


running like water

by macneiceisms



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Abigail Hobbs Lives, Canon-Typical Violence, Episode AU: s02e13 Mizumono, Gen, Lesbian Abigail Hobbs, Louisiana, M/M, Mentions of Cancer, Murder Family, Mutual Pining, Road Trips, Slow Burn, fucked up people feeling fucked up feelings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:14:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 59,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28412229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/macneiceisms/pseuds/macneiceisms
Summary: Instead of just doing what Hannibal tells her, a spooked Abigail finds Will before the dinner with Jack. On a road trip to Louisiana and on to, perhaps, a new life free of Hannibal’s influence, Will and Abigail learn who the other is now, Abigail reluctantly sort-of gets a new dad, and Will wonders if love with Hannibal can be anything but a slaughterhouse floor.(Or, in which Abigail isn’t a suitable substitute for therapy but maybe a fed-up teenager getting him to face his feelings is what he needs anyways. Abigail just wants to live and maybe kiss a girl.)
Relationships: Will Graham & Abigail Hobbs, Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 150
Kudos: 252





	1. Abigail

**Author's Note:**

> I've been really enjoying exploring Will and Abigail's relationship in my other fic, until you devour me, and wanted to write something that asked questions about what they would really be like together without Hannibal maneuvering them, including who they are now after being apart for so long, how Will uses her as a defense mechanism against Hannibal and his own feelings, and how much of a killer Abigail is versus just wanting to be safe.

1\. Abigail

* * *

_“a deer climbs the altar and slits her own throat. we have words for this but don’t speak them”_

-Yves Olade, bloodsport

* * *

The ground under her boots is damp, the thick smell of old vegetation in decay and the faint scent of spring verbena unfurling along the path. Her lungs ache. Her feet ache. She keeps going.

Going.

Going.

Because she has somewhere to go.

She left the cliffside house before morning light and reaches the road by afternoon. Then she keeps going.

A woman finds her shaking and cold outside a little grocery store.

“Are you alright, sweetheart?” she asks, her round face kind and ruddy, short blonde curls under a fluorescent orange beanie.

She’s wearing deep brown Carhartt overalls atop a wool sweater. Roughly in her early to mid-twenties, she’s taller than Abigail. Where Abigail is twiggy, this woman has broad shoulders and hands, her arms hard under her sweater. She smells like manure and saddle soap, fur all over her overalls. Horses.

Abigail shakes her head.

“No, I’m not,” she says.

“You need the police?”

Abigail shakes her head no. “No, not like that,” she says.

“I need to get back to my farm outside town. You can come with me. I’ll let you hold my knife,” she says, patting a bulge in the pocket of her overalls. “I won’t ask you questions.”

Abigail’s mouth quirks, a little flame of warmth sparking in her. She’s been frozen over completely since last night.

“Thanks,” she croaks, her voice rough with feeling. “I got my own.”

The woman tips her chin, and points her to silver pickup truck two cars down.

Abigail gets into the passenger seat. When the woman gets in the drivers seat, she asks Abigail to hold her groceries in her lap.

Eggs, butter in a big wax roll, bacon. Carrots and garlic and mushrooms and a lovely bundle of spring ramps. The bulge where her knife was is no longer there. She probably moved it closer to her, further from Abigail. Smart woman.

They drive west, over flooded marshes and through a couple run-down hamlets comprising little more than sinking wood houses and abandoned gas stations.

_Soon all this will be lost to the sea._

But there’s no bluff here, just the tide slowly swallowing the land.

The woman’s farm boasts a long gravel driveway flanked by a rough wood fence. Stocky little horses in what look like rain blankets graze around, mud to their knees. Three red-brown ones, one black one, and one with white patches all over. Abigail loves them.

She files the road and the house address away in her mind like Hannibal taught her.

“How do you get them clean?” she asks when they get out of the truck. The air smells like brackish water and manure.   


“Lots of scrubbing,” she replies.

Abigail carries the paper bag of groceries to the yellow house. It’s a little rectangle of a thing, with two downstairs windows and two upstairs windows perfectly flanking a little blue door. Only the small white porch, covering the door and one window skews the symmetry.

The woman leads the way in. Puts the groceries away in her builder-grade kitchen.

“If I asked you to take me somewhere, would you do it?” Abigail asks.

“How far?” she asks.

“A couple hours, I think,” says Abigail. “I can’t pay you. I don’t have anything.”

The woman looks at her.

Really _looks_ at her. Looks until Abigail feels like squirming, but she surrenders to the scrutiny. She’s still glad for her silk scarf — one of the darker blue ones Hannibal bought her — and her knit hat.

“I’m not running, not really. I’m trying to get somewhere. To someone,” Abigail says, sucking in a breath. “My dad.”

Nothing in the woman’s stance changes, but her hard, dark eyes change. They don’t soften, but they do accept.

“I’ll make coffee and sandwiches for the road. There’s clothes in the room upstairs,” she says, pointing to the stairs. “Shower quick. Change into something warmer. Leave what you have here. We’ll feed the horses, then go.”

Abigail nods, and does as she’s told. She comes back downstairs smelling like Old Spice, clad in a large gray and blue flannel and a pair of heavy twill pants that she had to cuff a few times. They hang loose on her, but fit better than she thought. She’s taken a new hat and scarf. They’re both wool and incredibly itchy.

The woman hands her a thermos.

They bring in the horses together in the fading evening light and put out flakes of hay in all their stalls. Gracie, Charlie, Hobnob, and Goose. Abigail smiles at the name.

“I like Goose,” she says, when the little brown and white pony smears spit with bits of grass over her arm.

The woman smiles.

“He’s a real stinker,” she says fondly.

Abigail smiles back.

She doesn’t know the address she needs so she asks the woman to look up a vet clinic on her phone. Abigail calls, lies a little, gets the address, and with a huge thermos and a paper bag of sandwiches, they set out into the night.

“Thank you,” Abigail says.

The woman just smiles and doesn’t ask her anything about it.

It’s almost four hours to Wolf Trap, which starts out with country tunes on the truck radio and ends with them talking about the town and the horses and how she moved out there from the city and she likes to take a little boat out on the Blackwater sometimes. There’s some vast thing she talks around that Abigail doesn’t begrudge her for.

She reminds Abigail of Will a little.

Abigail doesn’t tell her much in details, but does tell her she has nightmares. That she isn’t scared. Or, she’s been so scared for so long that she’s just put it away and kept moving. That she used to hunt.

“I feel like I died,” Abigail says. “And I’m done being dead. I need to live, even if it’s borrowed. Even if all I get is a little bit more time. I need to live.”

Abigail asks to be dropped off a few hundred feet back from Will’s house when they pull up on the lonesome road abutting the big park behind his house. Blue lights on the dashboard read five after ten. They’re far away from his suburbanite McMansion neighbors. There’s a light on the porch and in the windows, glowing warm and strong in the fathomless dark. There are no clouds to reflect the lights of the city in the distance, but Abigail can still orient them. A hazy glow over the tree line. Otherwise, she could forget that they’re in civilization at all. They stare at the house together.

Will’s car sits alone in the driveway. No Hannibal. No visitors. Good.

“It’s like a lighthouse,” says the woman.

“Yeah,” says Abigail. “Safe harbor.”

“Is it? Safe?”

It’s not safe if it’s a lighthouse. It’s safe only if it’s a boat far away from shore, far away from where she can shipwreck on Hannibal Lecter’s poisoned love for Will.

“You promised no questions,” Abigail smiles.

The woman holds her arms up in mock surrender.

“Couldn’t help that one,” she says.

She looks at Abigail like she sees her. Abigail looks back.

“I don’t know if it’s safe. But I know I have to do it,” she says, unbuckling her seat belt. “Thank you. I don’t know how to thank you, I know I can’t thank you.”

The woman just smiles, soft. Gentle. “Spending a couple hours with a beautiful girl is more than enough.”

Something electric runs down Abigail’s spine. Oh. _Oh._ It’s like she’s been drowning for longer than she can remember, and only now has she taken her first gulp of air, lungs still burning with water. She shoved all that stuff away after Marissa was killed. Was killed by Hannibal. God. _God._

Suddenly, Abigail doesn’t want to leave the car. Wants to go back to the little farm in the marsh, the horses, the terrible wallpaper and honey oak kitchen with peeling laminate countertops. She can’t. She _can’t_.

So she does the one thing she can do.

She leans in and kisses the woman. Coffee and ham sandwiches and something gloriously sweet. Soft, burning lips. Warm breath sighing into her mouth. A rough hand on her cheek. Beautiful. If this is all she gets, it could be enough.

“I’ll remember you,” says the woman. “I’ll think about you.”

“Just don’t worry about me,” says Abigail. “Whatever happens is just what’s supposed to happen.”

She gets out of the car before she can regret it, and heads down the road for house in the dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (i knew you  
> leavin' like a father  
> running like water, i  
> and when you are young, they assume you know nothing)


	2. Will

2\. Will

* * *

_"It wasn’t your crippled rhythm_

_I could not forgive, or your dark red_

_skinless head of a vulture_

_but the things you hid:_

_five words and my lost_

_gold ring, and the fine blue cup_

_you said was broken,_

_that stack of faces, gray_

_and folded, you claimed_

_we’d both forgotten,_

_the other hearts you ate,_

_and all that discarded time you hid_

_from me, saying it never happened."_

— Margaret Atwood, from _The Woman Makes Peace With Her Faulty Heart_

* * *

Whiskey sits in Will’s empty stomach like a knife. With the window repaired and whiskey slowly burn through his veins, he’s finally warm enough to sit in his study chair without his coat on. He’s been listlessly reading the same page of _Six Against the Rock_ for what seems like hours as his brain replays last night’s dinner with Hannibal.

_Our last supper._

_Of this life._

_To the truth, then. And all its consequences._

The look on Hannibal’s face at dinner and his choked voice haunted him. Hunted him. Will had barely been able to look at him. Barely been able to keep the food down with how twisted up he’d been inside. So many chances to trap Hannibal, to kill him, to dismantle his life, and he’d delayed them all.

He hadn’t exactly predicted every move of Hannibal’s on the board, but they had nonetheless failed to surprise him. Instead, Will had surprised himself. Every chance to end it, and instead he’d borrowed more time. _There are holes in the floor of the mind._ He wishes he could tuck his compassion away in a room and burn it down. He’s doing this for a reason. Good reasons. Abigail. Beverly. Induced blackouts and seizures. Being framed.

The dwindling grains in the hourglass, grains that marked a fairy tale in which they made murder and mercy and dinner, eat away at him. Not much time left.

His dogs break out in a chorus of barking, which startles him out if his thoughts.

“Guys,” he groans. Out of habit, he grabs his rifle and moves to where the dogs scrabble at the door.“Shh, shh,” he scolds them.

Headlights disappear into the trees and someone walks up his driveway toward the house. Who the hell would be dropped off here, under the dark of night? He orders the dogs silent and still with a single command.

Will slips through the door with his rifle poised, wary. It’s too dark to make out the figure. By the walk, it’s a woman. _Margot? Alana?_ She’s wearing oversize clothes and a hat. Some kind of thick scarf. He blinks. She keeps walking. Walking like she’s hunting him, even though his gun is a hair away from pointing at her.

Oh _god_.

She’s a ghost. She has to be a ghost. He drank too much whiskey. Hannibal maybe put something in it after Will denied him their almost-polite departure. He’s finally fully cracked. Irreparably broken.

“Abigail?” he chokes out.

In front of the steps, she tips her chin up to the light. She’s crying.

“Hi,” she says with a wobbly smile.

“I think I’m hallucinating,” says Will.

She pulls off her hat. Tucks her hair behind her ears — no, _oh god — her ear._

“I get that,” she whispers. “Not every day you see a ghost.”

He laughs, somewhere between horror and humor. “Ah, actually, it happens a lot to me.”

Something wet runs hot down his face, then goes cold in the chilly night air. Abigail — solid, real, alive, breathing, crying — crushes him in a hug. He feels like something’s cutting into him, like something’s being cut out of him. They sink on jello legs to the porch floor, Abigail’s shaking body cradled to his chest until he’s the one shaking too hard and he’s the one being held.

“I’m so sorry,” Will sobs into her hair that smells like cheap drugstore shampoo. “I’m so sorry.”

“I’m sorry too,” she says.

“Why are you here, Abigail?” Will rasps.

“I ran. Are you going to tell him I’m here?” she asks, wide-eyed and vulnerable and manipulative.

He can’t begrudge her for it. She only ever wanted to be safe.

“Not if you don’t want me to,” Will says.

“Would you take me somewhere else? Somewhere where I don’t have to think about him for a little while?” she says.

Still choked, his face hot and tight with tears, Will nods. “Lets go inside.”

He wobbles to his feet, lifting Abigail up after him hand in hand.

Tomorrow night. Their dinner with Jack is tomorrow night. And Will knows he can’t go now, not when Abigail’s here.

 _Did Hannibal plan this?_ While Will makes tea, the cogs of his mind whirr so quickly he thinks he can smell smoke, Abigail lets all the dogs bowl her over.

The clothes aren’t hers. They’re too big and Hannibal would never have bought Abigail something that would be at home in his own closet. A woman, slightly taller and broader but lean enough. Boots a size too big with two socks to make up for it. A smear of chewed up grass on the arm of her shirt with white and black hairs smeared on it. A woman with farm animals. Horses, if he remembers the scent of the stables Peter worked at.

He wants to believe she ran of her own accord. She must have sensed clear and imminent danger, which means Hannibal let something slip. A change of plans? _We could leave tonight._ And _we_ wasn’t just him and Hannibal. It was Abigail too. Hannibal saved her for Will. A deep stab of shame pierces him. He’d been so close to saying _yes, tonight_ , or confessing the plan and begging Hannibal to flee without him.

Over mugs of tea, Abigail in the chair and Will on the floor amongst the dogs, she tells him her version of the blood and the ear, which brings the memory of the tube and Hannibal’s hands over his face back into focus. He sits with his head between his knees until the nausea fades, until the phantom pains of hunger at the BSHCI fade.

He thinks about how every touch of Hannibal’s is a modified blow.

She’s healthier than he remembers, which at least means Hannibal was treating her well. Her eyes are sharper and less frightened of him. As far as ghosts to, she’s becoming more and more solid as the minutes tick by.

“God, what the fuck are our lives?”

“They’re his,” Abigail says.

“Sealed a pact with the Devil,” Will scoffs. “He gave you your life and you gave him a pound of flesh.”

“Bare my throat when he comes to collect? Die on a kitchen floor, like I was supposed to, all along?” she says.

“No,” Will says. “No, that’s not happening.”

She shakes her head, long, dark hair over her shoulders. The flannel drowns her and makes her look smaller, frailer. It also makes her look wilder.

“He made a place for us. He wanted to take us to Florence.”

Will sighs in acknowledgment.

“Do you want to leave now?” he asks. His knees creak as he stands and ponders his narrowing life the dregs of tea sediment at the bottom of his mug. She nods. “Ok. You can stay upstairs and sleep for a bit while I get things together and sober up. Maybe an hour. Don’t turn the lights on,” Will says.

“I don’t know if I can sleep,” she admits, but the pale exhaustion on her face tells him otherwise.

She looks dead on her feet.

“You hiked seven hours, you need rest,” he says gently, “How much time do you think you have before he checks on you?”

“He was going to pick me up tomorrow morning, but he usually texts me. After a few missed ones all day he might have come today to look for me.”

Will nods. “Rest. We can talk once we’re out of here. Keep the light off.”

Abigail goes upstairs. The floor creaks like there’s a ghost upstairs. In a way, there is. The whiskey and gut-wrenching mess of feelings have burned their way through him, leaving an exhausted, restless focus. He percolates coffee, drinks it down too hot and too fast, and packs some bags.

He feels hollowed out. He’s not ready to think about what Hannibal leaving Abigail alive means. What the price of non-decision or betrayal would have been. _Feed the dogs, leave a note. Almost polite._

_I would forgive you._

Abigail is the price for betrayal. Knowing she’s been alive all this time, knowing the plan to abscond to Florence in familial bliss, the weight of Will’s failure to leave last night sits like broken glass in his stomach. Abigail would pay for Will’s betrayal. _We could leave now. Tonight. No one else would have to die._

Who was the albatross on Will’s neck, Jack or Hannibal? _I would forgive you._ Hannibal had known, somehow, about Freddie, and so it would never have mattered that Will wanted to go with him. He would have paid the price for bringing Hannibal so low as to be tricked. Abigail would have paid the price. The night would have ended in blood.

 ** _Can you feed the dogs this weekend?_** he texts Alana as they buckle up. **_Or ask my neighbor. Took Winston on a fishing trip._**

Then, because something nags at him, **_By the way, always double-check your bullets._**

Then, with his rifle slung over his shoulder, he packs the car with his gear and his bags. He packs his handgun, unloaded, along with his permits. He eventually leaves his rifle, and makes sure that anyone looking around the house, even someone as sharp-eyed as Hannibal, would see the intention of returning. The pile of documents and bit of cash from his safe, packed in the bottom of a duffel bag, say otherwise.

He makes more coffee and some scrambled eggs, then calls Abigail down. He eats in the front room, watchful of the driveway, while she eats in the kitchen. After giving the house once last once-over to ensure it looks like only Will’s been here and that he’s coming back, they slip away under darkness. As they drive away, the farmhouse fading away in the rearview like a boat carried away on a storm, he feels like Hannibal’s in the car with them. A familiar prickle over his skin. He has to glance at the back seat to be sure there’s no one else there, certainly no one wearing a custom Italian cashmere suit amongst the dog hair.

But it’s just their bags and gear and Winston, who keeps his nose on the center console, pressed up to Will and Abigail’s elbows. He has to remember to breathe. That Hannibal hasn’t come with them. _My name is Will Graham. It’s 2:02 am. I’m leaving Wolf Trap, Virginia. Abigail Hobbs is alive._

“Where are we going?” Abigail asks.

“I was thinking Savage River. We can get a cabin. It’ll be safe until we decide what’s next.”

Despite the restless energy she talked about the night before, she quickly falls asleep in the passenger seat. Succumbs to the hunted exhaustion chasing her since the early hours of yesterday morning. It reminds Will of the drive to Minnesota with Hannibal. The memory sits strangely in his gut. He blinks, and there Hannibal is, alert in the passenger seat in Abigail’s place. Red jacket and beige sweater, a small smile of amusement on his face. The day Will had killed Garrett Jacob Hobbs. The day Hannibal had saved Abigail. The day they both condemned her.

The only albatross around his neck is his own compassion for Hannibal.


	3. Abigail

3\. Abigail

* * *

_“The phone rings, I think it’s God and I feel fear. A blue shadow closes the door and prevents the exit. Again, the roar of death. I observe the inner crack: it is my father who wallows in my gut and makes me ask for his forgiveness.”_

—Mery Yolanda Sánchez, frag. ‘Encuentros’

* * *

Abigail wakes in the dark to rain lashing the windshield and the warm purr of a car engine. The highway rolls up and down through the hint of hills she catches in the glare of the Volvo’s headlights. Her breath leaves a fading fog on the glass. 

She shifts a little, feeling the ache in her back and legs. In her borrowed boots, the arches of her feet feel like fire. Her heels are sore. She can’t believe that less than twenty-four hours ago, she was lying awake in the cliffside house, paralyzed with horror on top of her covers.

_Change of plans,_ haunts Hannibal’s voice. 

At some point, Will must have pulled a wool camp blanket over her, even though the heat is on and keeping her toes nice and toasty. Comfort and weight to keep her asleep. It’s nice. The clock reads 3:58 am. 

“We almost there?” Abigail mumbles.

Will’s voice comes rough and tired. “Another hour.”

She looks over at him. He looks nothing like the strung-out, terrorized man that took her to Minnesota and cornered her in the cabin, and yet, he is. She catalogues the glint of his stormy eyes, his stubborn jaw, the almost-feminine slope of his nose — so unlike hers. Her nose looks more like Hannibal’s. Whatever happens, she’ll remember him like this. Cooly determined, eyes sharp, one hand loose on the bottom of the steering wheel and the other on the gearshift. She’ll remember how he’d been so relieved to see her, how he’d held her tight like she didn’t have anything to be afraid of, how he’d smiled at her buried under all the dogs, how he’d packed the car and left his dogs and his home just because she’d asked him. No reminder that she was alone without him, no veiled threat to keep his secrets, no reminder that the world hated her or of how much he was giving up. Will didn’t want anything from her except to protect her, and only because she’d asked. Whether he still carries the idea of her as an innocent lamb remains to be seen. She doesn’t want to be anyone’s ideal. 

Groaning, she stretches, yawning, and turns her torso around to check on Winston. The russet mutt opens his eyes, tail thumping against the seat. When she reaches to pet him he licks her hand enthusiastically. 

“Thank you,” she says. “For…this.”

“Least I can do,” he replies, soft. 

“He called me last night and told me to pack. That he’d pick me up tomorrow afternoon,” she murmurs. “Something was wrong. Something in his voice felt so wrong. Like when my dad got the phone call and I just felt this…incredible sense of dread. Like my time was somehow up.”

Telling Will makes it real and harrowing, and she has to look in the passenger side mirror to make sure the black Bentley isn’t tailing them. 

“He felt like a monster?” Will asks.

“No,” Abigail whispers, watching the wipers flick flick, flick flick, the rain away. “He felt human.”

Will frowns. His jaw works like he’s chewing through her words.

“He’s not human, Abigail. He’s the devil.”

“I think,” she whispers. “I think when it comes to you, he might be a little human.”

Will’s knuckles turn white on the gearshift.

“It’s just because he can’t predict me,” Will says. 

She’s not sure Will understands what she’s trying to say. Will isn’t just a toy or some elaborate Rube-Goldberg machine. Hannibal loves Will in a way that’s unmoored him, in a way that’s changed him, even if neither of them see it yet. But Will, with his shuttered eyes, ignores it. 

“I wanted to be unpredictable too,” Abigail says. “Left a note. Didn’t take anything. Left a note saying...saying I was taking my life back.”

Will appraises her. “So if he looks, he’ll think you’re dead?” 

“Maybe,” she says. “I really thought about it too, you know, just as an exercise. Let myself feel like my life was over. Because when I looked at him and saw him, I knew it was. You do something to him. Me...I’m just a way to get to you. A gift or a punishment, depending on how you’d choose. I wanted to think he cared for me. That he loved me. Then I remembered that someone can love you and still slit your throat.”

He’s silent for a few tense heartbeats. 

“A shepherd can love the lamb and still slaughter it.”

“Yeah.”

“I think...I think I’d kill him to keep you safe,” he whispers. “I’d let him kill me to try to keep you safe.”

The second part catches her in her throat. She has a flickering vision of blood. Will, gutted like a deer. Will, allowing it to happen. Will, watching the knife slash through her throat and pleading no, no, no. Will, crawling through blood. Will, taking his hands away from his own wound to cover hers. To keep her alive. 

Red-ribboned lamb.

_In some other world._

“I think I might have let him kill me too,” she whispers. “Like a deer, too scared to move from inevitable disaster.”

With a little squeeze on her arm before he moves his hand back to the gearshift, he smiles sadly. “You’re moving. It’s not inevitable.”

The quick look they share says neither of them are sure they believe that. 

“You gotta live in spite of him. Even when you’d do anything to kill the thing inside you that he put there,” he says after a heavy silence, surrounded by drumming rain. 

“He didn’t put anything there,” she whispers. “He just reached in and dug it up.”

“Carved us in his image,” Will says. 

“But we’re still made of whatever we’re made of. He didn’t change the stuff. Just the shape,” says Abigail. 

Abigail turns her head back to the window, watching the ground past the highway shoulder fly past. Her breath mists the cold window again. “It’s inevitable. I just want it to be a long time away.”

Unable to sleep again, she moves restlessly. She flips through the glove compartment, where there’s a car manual, a flashlight, a tire pressure gauge, and a pack of tissues. It’s spotless of course, like the rest of the car. Will doesn’t have junk anywhere, even if he’ll never get all the dog hair out of the carpet. 

The passenger’s side door is stuffed with maps of different parks, the DC-Maryland-Virginia area, and one of the greater New Orleans area. Underneath all of it is an old Smith’s CD. _Meat is Murder._ Her mouth slants into a smile. 

“Can I?” she asks, holding the album up. 

Will glances over, then does a double take. He laughs. “Oh my god. I forgot that was there.”

She’s never really seen him smile or laugh like that. With his curls spilling out of his cap and his old flannel under a vest, he’s never looked more like a country boy. She likes this earnest part of him. The more faces of Will Graham she sees, the more she thinks she could like him. 

“I think you and Hannibal have the same awful sense of humor,” she says, chuckling softly. Will frowns at that, but the expression slides into something else as she slides the CD in and the first guitar notes start up. 

_“Belligerent ghouls_

_Run Manchester schools_

_Spineless swines_

_Cemented minds”_

It’s nothing like the stuff her dad or her friends listened to. Her dad listened almost exclusively to old country music or the stupid libertarian talk radio show. Her friends were all crazy about Taylor Swift. Abigail didn’t really ever get a chance to listen to anything for herself and so she doesn’t know if she likes it or not. 

Her hand twitches out with the desire to turn off the plaintive wailing, until Will starts singing softly under his breath. 

_“I want to go home_

_I don't want to stay_

_Give up education_

_Is a bad mistake.”_

It’s too much. She shuts off the music and sighs out a breath she’d unknowingly held. Home. She can’t go home. She died twice in that kitchen, and every inch of it is covered in her blood. 

“Sorry,” says Abigail. “Sorry.”

A crease appears between Will’s eyebrows. “It’s fine. I’m surprised I remember any of the words. I haven’t listened to that since I finished grad school.”

“I’m not surprised,” she says. She runs her lower lip through her teeth; the bite of pain reorients her. “Hannibal said you don’t forget much.”

“Nearly eidetic memory, yeah,” Will admits. 

She turns the empty CD case over in her hands. 

“Do we talk about what’s next?” Abigail asks. 

“Yeah. I don’t know if we should put it off any longer. You don’t have to decide now.”

“What…what are my options?”

Will takes in a deep breath.

“I’m not your dad. You have a right to walk away from me and tell me to never speak to you again. You can walk away. I can try to get you some papers, some money and a train or bus ticket to wherever you want. You don’t have to tell me where. I won’t look for you. I’ll go back to whatever the hell my life is and figure it out on my own and I won’t tell anyone about you. You’d be alone.”

Abigail’s heart skips and clenches. He means it. She can walk away. Even though saying it looks like it guts him, he’s willing to let her go if that’s what she wants. _Not like my dad. Not like Hannibal._ It was so shockingly selfless a statement that she didn’t know what to do with it. The words just hung in the air, like just suspended on sunlight. 

Will continues. “Or I can call Jack and explain what happened. Protective custody. You’d have a new, legal identity. You’d probably help the FBI catch him.”

“Is that what you want?” she frowns, a creeping sense of unease washing over her. “To put him behind bars?”

Will’s eyes dart away from the road for a moment. “I wanted justice.”

“For who?” 

“For you,” he says. 

She turns the words over, not sure of how they sit. 

“And now that I’m here, what do you want?” she asks. 

“For him to admit what he is. The truth,” says Will. “Retribution for what he did to me.”

“You wanted him to understand the way he betrayed you,” says Abigail. That sounds more truthful. 

“Yeah,” he sighs. 

“I think Jack Crawford wants justice. Do you think he’s really going to give me protective custody? Or put me behind bars as an accessory to murder?” she asks archly. 

“Jack thought you were the CopyCat. He knows Hannibal is responsible for those crimes now, and you’re a witness to that,” Will says. “They’d question you, but you probably would get immunity from anything you’ve done. Might not even need to go to his trial or anything.”

“Like a cage could keep him,” she scoffs.

“It might for a while.”

“I don’t think I want that. I don’t think you really want that either,” Abigail says. Will doesn’t respond. The dashboard lights cast a cruel blue glow on his face. “The evidence against me was circumstantial, wasn’t it? Before Nick Boyle. If he cared about me...just for my own sake...he could have hired a good lawyer. Could have gotten me an apartment or something. I didn’t want anyone to think I had anything to do with it, but maybe if I’d been more honest, said he forced me into it…”

Will sighs. “Everything that can happen happens. There are worlds where you made a different choice.”

“What, then I can never make the wrong choice?” she scoffs.

“Something like that,” says Will.

“I was so terrified. I made a deal with the devil.”

“The thing about the devil is he comes to you lookin’ like an angel,” Will says.

_(He does. And sometimes he comes looking like a father.)_

“Is there another option? For me…for us?” she asks.

“I can take you back to the cliff house,” he says. “Or call him and explain what happened.”

“And what, we all leave together, oh-so happy with him knowing I can slip away from him and him knowing you can betray him? He’ll kill us. Maybe not right away but eventually, he’ll kill us.”

“You thought you wanted that,” Will says, a little sharp. “Until he got a little unpredictable for you.”

Abigail bites her lip. This side of Will, sharp as a knife, is harder to like.

“I wanted to be safe. Jack suspected me. You scared me. You thought I was the CopyCat, that I killed Marissa. Jack Crawford thought so too. I didn’t know what to do. You brought me out there. He found me and he gave me a way out.”

Will exhaled, shaking. “I’ll always be sorry about that.”

“I know,” Abigail says softly. “Is there another option for me?”

“Yeah,” he replies. “We could disappear together, you and me. I could tie up all the loose ends remotely so I’m not a missing person, spin a story for the FBI, and then we start a different life together. Let go of Hannibal Lecter.”

“That wasn’t your first option. Why?”

Will is silent for a while, his face shuttered. Then, he says, “I’m not so attached to my life that I can’t leave it. But if we go somewhere together, I’m responsible for you. And you, for me. It requires trust between the two of us and not just…manufactured familial feelings.”

“You worry your ties to me aren’t genuine,” she says. “Because I said you aren’t my dad just because you killed him?”

Will winces visibly. “You’ve been dead long enough that I don’t...don’t have that same delusion. I’m wary because I don’t want to replace your dad. Because Hannibal spent a lot of time coaxing out my paternal feelings for you when you probably just wanted a friend to help you understand what happened. I don’t want to step into a role I’m not wanted in.”

“Are you wary of me?”

“I’m wary of Hannibal’s influence.”

“Then we can get to know each other without it. I can learn about you firsthand too. Why are you trying so hard to push me away?” Abigail says. 

She knows she’s needling him and she’s caught between feeling like he does and doesn’t deserve it. Mostly, she wants to know what he’ll do. So far she can’t pin him down.

“I’m not pushing you away, Abigail. I’m here right beside you,” Will says. He gives her a small, sad smile. _I’m here right beside you._ It feels real. She ducks her head to avoid his intense stare. He never used to _look_ at her. Now even a glance opens up her ribs. 

“I’m different, you’re different?” she says. 

“Something like that.”

The rain lightens to a drizzle as they pull in to a 24-hour roadside diner off I-68. It’s silver-sided with neon lighting. Will lets Winston out for a quick pee and then leaves him in the car. Inside, amongst the 60’s decor, a jukebox howls our a mournful, stepping tune. She doesn’t recognize the song, but Will’s mouth slants in a smile when he glances at it. On the song selector display, she reads Pasty Cline, _Walking After Midnight_. The song gets filed away in a room she’s made for Will, on the blue-green shelf by the piano in his old, white farmhouse. Right next to _Meat is Murder._

At five am, there are only a few truckers and early-shifters at the counter. Her and Will take a booth overlooking the Volvo, where they can see Winston standing on the divider between the two front seats. Abigail smiles; he’s watching over them. 

Will orders a pot of coffee and plain toast from the salt-and-pepper haired waitress who calls him _darling_ and Abigail _honey_. Abigail just gets some biscuits with blackberry jam. When she walks back into the kitchen, Abigail catches a glimpse of some dark cloud hanging behind Will’s dark eyes. He looks haunted and exhausted. Deep blue bruises sit under his long and dark lower lashes, stark against his pale skin. Everything looks harsher under the fluorescent glow. 

_I’m wary of Hannibal’s influence_ , he’d said. Is that what he sees now when he looks at her? Not an innocent survivor, but someone corrupted by Hannibal?

“You want to know what Hannibal’s influence on me was,” Abigail says. 

“I suppose I do,” Will says, blinking. “You spent a lot more time with him than you ever spent with me. He took care of you while my brain was cooking. He took care of you after, when in my mind you were dead.”

“He called every couple of days. He came by every weekend if he could to deliver groceries and gave me simple recipes to learn how to cook. Scrambled eggs. Spaghetti a la Bolognese. Roast chicken. That sort of thing. When he came he’d make a more elaborate dinner and I would sous-chef. He taught me to evenly dice vegetables and how to make a roux. The chemical principles behind cooking meat.”

“Maillard reaction,” Will smiles. 

“Yeah, how did you know —”

“I was actually a decent lab specialist before I started teaching. Biochem and body decomposition.”

“I think I liked English class more than I ever liked biology. Dissecting frogs always just reminded me of…”

She shared a look with Will, knowing she didn’t have to explain any more than that. 

The waitress returns with their coffee and food. Will takes his with a single sugar and drains the entire boiling mugful in a single go. Abigail doesn’t know what expression her face makes at this while she butters her warm biscuits and piles them with jam, but when he’s done drinking, he chuckles. 

“Sorry, I’m exhausted,” he says. 

She bites into her biscuit. Bright sweetness with an earthy tang bursts on her tongue. The warm, salty butter and the crumbly biscuit round out the flavors. 

“I’m tired too. The nap helped.” 

Will chews his plain toast, clearly not savoring any of the flavors. 

“What did you like reading?” Will asks, once his toast is done and he’s poured himself more coffee. 

“I liked _Call of the Wild_ when we read it in 10th grade lit _,_ ” she says. “But the online GED curriculum I finished had me reading _Hamlet_ and _1984_ and a bunch of other books. I…I like stuff about nature more than science fiction or the stuff Hannibal likes, like _Dante_ and _The Odyssey_ and _The Oresteia_ and shit _._ ”

“Mythology and religion give us metaphors and stories through which to understand our feelings and relationships,” Will says. He sounds so much like Hannibal saying that her knife freezes while buttering up a second biscuit. She looks at him. With a soft, pained laugh, he shakes his head. “Yeah, yeah. Me and him both have trouble articulating feelings in a direct way. I know.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t have to. It’s all over your face,” he says, pointing at her. 

They finish their food in silence. When Will’s on his third and last mug of coffee, Abigail puts her hands on the tabletop to steady herself. She breathes in, then out. Steady. She looks him in the eye. 

“I want to go with you,” she says. “I want to go together. Maybe it won’t work out and we can go our separate ways, but I can’t really go it alone right now. I don’t have documents. I don’t have money. I left everything at the house.”

“You…” he frowns. “You don’t need to twist me around your finger. I can see you.”

Fear and frustration flicker through her. “So you won’t do it? Why give me the option?”

“I didn’t say that,” he sighs, setting down the coffee. 

“I think you want to discourage me from disappearing with you because you want to go back to him,” Abigail says. 

Will’s expression goes tense and blank. He’s about to say something back when the waitress comes by. He just hands her his bank card without asking for the check. When she’s gone, he turns back to Abigail, solemn and steely-eyed. “I want to protect you, but I think you have to choose how you’ll protect yourself.”

“What about you?” she asks. “What protects you?”

“I don’t know. I never feel like I have any armor.”

“You can’t hide from something that’s already under your skin,” she says softly, unable to help look over the parking lot for the black Bentley. 

“Mm,” he nods. 

“I’ll look out for you,” she says. 

He nods. “I’ll look out for you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> slightly longer chapter for you all! thank you guys for the lovely comments, I'm so excited to be working on this story and sharing it. 
> 
> song is The Headmaster Ritual


	4. Hannibal

4\. Hannibal

* * *

Abigail’s cell rings through with no answer. As it shifts to the automatic voicemail message, Hannibal sets down his whisk. The morning sunlight catches the stainless steel tines and refracts in a kaleidoscope of light on the ceiling.

“Hello, Abigail. I’m calling to make sure you had all the information you needed to tidy up the house before I pick you up tomorrow. I hope you will be packed and ready. Call me soon,” he says.

He returns to whisking eggs for a delightful herb and prosciutto omelette. Abigail sometimes sleeps in or goes walking where the service is spotty or practices her scales. She’ll call back soon.

When his artful breakfast is complete, he savors the layers of salt and amines in the prosciutto, the airy eggs, fatty and savory both. Honeyed goat cheese rounds out each bite with sweetness. Bright, fresh orange juice provides the finishing note. No bitter lamb. No soured wine. No salt burning his eyes.

Not here.

If only he could stop tasting it on his tongue when the other flavors subside. Like the taste of that soup in a cold, caved-in cabin, far, far away from here.

When Hannibal returns from a morning excursion to the Farmer’s Market, he rings Abigail’s cell again, and again it goes to the rote voicemail greeting. He drums his fingertips against his thigh.

He doesn’t panic. This isn’t panic. He’s concerned. Perhaps it’s best that he picks her up tonight, just to be sure.

He puts his groceries away. He eats a light lunch. He taps out a few pieces on his harpsichord. Nothing soothes the feeling clawing up inside him. Freddie Lounds’ hair product. Lamb. Will’s tortured face at dinner.

The three hour drive to the Eastern Shore, across the long Bay Bridge and over Kent Island, past Blackwater and wide marshes reflecting the darkening gray sky, Hannibal spends in trembling silence. In his mind, there are howls and screams and rattles. There is blood.

No lights illuminate the house when he parks out front, and inside, the house is cold and silent as a draft.

“Abigail?” he calls out, receiving only the echo of his own voice in the cavernous space.

He wanders each room, turning on the lights as he delves further into the house. No blood. Nothing broken. Abigail’s room is similarly unperturbed. Her clothes hang in the closet as usual, only a single sweater and jeans missing. The bed still holds the rough impression of her form on the pillow; the sheets a faint hint of her scent. She slept there the night prior.

It was as if she simply walked out the door and vanished. Even her phone lies plugged in on the nightstand, as if she’ll simply return from another room to grab it.

Hannibal doubles back through the house.

There’s a note on the pianoforte in the pages of the Chopin piece Abigail had been working on.

 _I’m sorry,_ it reads. _I’ve been living on borrowed time since the first time my dad decided to kill a girl who looked like me instead of me. I want to take back what was stolen from me. This is the only way I know how. I was grateful to be your daughter for a little while. Thank you for teaching me to play the piano. If you ever tell Will, tell him I’m sorry too._

_I hope some other world is kinder on me._

_Abigail_

Hannibal holds the letter in numb hands. He reads it over and over and over, the implications unfurling like wisps of smoke. He tries to grasp them, only to have them diffuse in his clenched fist.

_I hope some other world is kinder on me._

No, no, no, Absolutely not.

The implication in her letter is clear, but there’s no cold body bleeding out in his kitchen with poetic symmetry. No body anywhere. And wouldn’t she want him to know for sure? Or, maybe not. Maybe he’d underestimated her willfulness. Miscalculated some part of her psyche. He’d trusted her to stay with him, to need him, to turn to him and no one else in the world. Instead she’d turned away.

His focus narrows inward, summing up all the details. Abigail’s scent in the house is cold, and no traces of blood reach his nose. Her phone, with all his missed texts and calls lies on her nightstand. There’s nothing missing except a single set of clothes. No indication she packed anything.She walked out of the house alive, but after, where did she go? And why?

Outside, no tire tracks but his own lead to the house. He grabs a flashlight from the car and scans the edge of the woods for footprints. There are a few deer paths, but with the earth being solid and dry and laden with pine needles there won’t be any tracks.

“Abigail?” he calls into the dark.

The spring air, thick with salt, chokes his lungs with cold.

“Abigail!”

The wind howls back. It’s his only answer.

When he’s dirtied his shoes enough and numbed his hands and feet, he returns to the house. On the piano bench, he searches through her phone again. Nothing but the calls to Hannibal himself. Nothing in her notes or in her pictures or in her browsing history. Nothing at all until a set of voice memos catch his eye. He hits play.

At first, he hears his own voice. “ _Keep your wrists flat.”_

Abigail’s soft laugh comes through the phone speakers. _“I know.”_

The notes to Chopin’s Prelude in D. Minor begin. That night Abigail had worn the burgundy silk scarf around her pale neck, smirking as she’d said _it looks like blood._ With her soft black cashmere sweater and black jeans, she’d looked like Rose Red. The picture fit beautifully in his mind: a dark-haired, wild, outspoken thing, sister to a fair-haired, quiet girl. His two daughters.

Abigail in the recording misses a few notes and fumbles the tempo in parts, but tears well in Hannibal’s eyes regardless. Only a few short weeks of dedicated study. Such capacity for learning, such promise of beauty. Gone.

Gone.

But _where?_

 _“That was lovely, Abigail,”_ says his recorded self. _“You are making wonderful progress.”_

 _“Thanks,”_ she says, bright. He closes the voice memo. He imagines she recorded more of her piano playing, to register and to learn. And for what? To leave all that potential to dust?

_(Like you didn’t decide to kill her the second you smelled Freddie Lounds.)_

Like an automaton, his mind buried under snow, air thick with the scent of cold and cooking fire and stew, he walks outside and up to the edge of the cliff. The early spring air bites hard and sharp. Wind howls over the cliff and the roiling black water below, white-capped and crashing against crumbling rock, must be ice cold.

There are boot-prints on the edge.

He stands out there until he’s shaking. It’s so cold his nose pours. His eyes leak. Salt water. So much salt water.

_Gone._

His lip curls. How dare she go where he can’t follow? How dare she blind him to her nature? How dare her and Will…Will Graham and and now Abigail Hobbs have become circumstances entirely out of his control.

And worse, he thinks as he gets back in the car, mud splattered and trembling and tears pouring from his face like an open wound, his feelings about them are now beyond his control.

 _Your feelings about Will Graham have been out of control since you met him,_ comes Bedelia’s unwelcome, measured voice. He pushes her voice away and puts the car into drive.

A cursory investigation of the nearest hamlets — barely more than one-block strips with a motel and a corner grocer and sometimes a gun or fishing store — fails to turn up any trace of Abigail. No one’s seen a hitchhiker or revealed a young woman that ‘he was supposed to meet here, has she shown up?’

He turns the car westward. He drives in silence again. Silence everywhere but the roaring of his mind like wind in one’s ears when plummeting down a cliff. When he sets across the expanse of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, leaving the marshy pools of Kent Island and the Eastern Shore behind him, going to Will’s house and his own weigh equally in his mind.

The exit for I-97 North approaches like a great cavalry brigade, the rhythmic tick-tick tick-tick of seams on the bridge concrete hammering like hooves. Will would still be asleep in his camp bed, glossy curls rumpled with sleep and night sweat, the dogs still hours away from rousing him. A noble man surrounded by his loyal hunting hounds; Diogenes with his lantern, searching for an honest man in the daylight amongst his dogs.

Hannibal could see him one last time. Tell him that Abigail had still been alive to see the bright joy, the terrible remorse of betrayal, only to snuff it out. No point waiting for tomorrow or for Jack when Abigail had wrested back control of her life in the most despicable way. He’d show Will the gift, then take it away, like Will had done to him. Slide a knife into his belly and rip that beating heart right out from under his ribs. In the last seconds before death, Will would see Hannibal sinking his teeth into red flesh.

_(Is there any point bringing Abigail back and killing her without welding the knife directly?)_

His fingers drum absently on the steering wheel. _You’re out of control,_ Bedelia whispers.

_So I will make my own control._

He’ll kill Will tonight.

The blinker ticking softly, he moves into the left lane. A drizzle starts. His vision blurs to trail-light red haze, fragmented through rain. Blood hums through his veins.

He’ll have Will’s blood on his hands.

“I didn’t kill her,” says Will. He’s nestled in the passenger seat, rumple-haired and in a black sweater and jacket that now lie in evidence bags in the bowels of the FBI with a bullet hole in the arm. Under heavy lashes, Will’s dark eyes pin him.

“You did, Will. You signed her death when you decided to betray me.”

“Did I?” Will asks.

“Sign her death? Yes.”

“No. Betray you,” Will replies, with one brow raised. “Or at least, betray you first. You made me think I killed her and ate her. You framed me. You lied to me. I let you see me, and what did you give me in return? Did I not promise you a reckoning?”

Hannibal presses his lips together.

“Killing me won’t bring her back to you. Her death wouldn’t have brought me back to you. You’ll just lose us both,” Will says.

“Did you think you could make me as willingly vulnerable as I made you?” Hannibal snarls. “You think you could change me?”

Will doesn’t answer, and then is gone the next time Hannibal looks.

( _He already did.)_

The highway turns into the Beltway, then into I-66. Drizzle renders everything slick and black under his headlights, as if the road were spilling over with blood. When Will’s house comes into view, even through haze of strengthening rain, Will’s obviously not home. The muddy furrows where Will parks his car form rippling pools.

Hannibal parks his Bentley, gripping the steering wheel. Buster peeks out of the front window of Will’s farmhouse, wagging his tail and lolling his tongue in anticipation of seeing Hannibal. There aren’t any sausages for him today.

No trouble that Will’s out. Hannibal can be patient. Climbing out from the car and jogging up to the house, his shoes leave tracks on the porch. He unlocks the door and slips inside to a whirlwind of excited bundles of fur, greeting him with raised tails and wet noses against his hand.

He greets each dog in turn, giving Buster a few more scratches than the others. The little devil licks Hannibal’s hand. Does he instinctively sense the roiling storm in Hannibal and feel compelled to soothe it, though its cause is forever unknowable to the creature who leaves white hairs all over his trousers and trails of wet snot on his hands?

“Where’s your master?” Hannibal murmurs.

The house sits empty of its human occupant and Winston. Car gone, fishing gear gone. A pre-dawn fishing trip? The scent of scrambled eggs and toast haunting the air suggest just that. Will’s bed is unmade and un-slept it. Over the scent of dogs, Will’s scent is hard to pin.

The rain would put a damper on Will’s excursion, unless he’d driven further out than usual. He wonders, absently, where he’s gone.

Hannibal sits amongst the dogs, save for Winston. They’re pure souls. Kind and trusting even after tasting Mason’s tainted flesh, even after histories of abandonment and abuse. Ellie sniffs his shoes. Jack curls up by Hannibal’s thigh. They provide a childlike sort of comfort, digging up a memory of the hounds his father once kept. Beautiful, sleek black Lithuanian hounds with chestnut points, all sitting politely at Hannibal’s feet, waiting for bites of sausage.

He doesn’t know how long he sits amongst the dogs, wandering aimlessly though the halls of his mind. It’s light when the soft sigh of the screen door drags him back to reality.

“Hannibal?” Alana asks, confused. “What are you doing here —” Through her eyes, he sees his own state: mud-soaked trousers covered in dog hair, ruined shoes, his red, haggard face. “What happened?”

Her blue eyes — the wrong color — glint, wide in the gray morning light. She doesn’t move from the door even as a few dogs rise to greet her, nosing at her rain-damp coat.

The heady scent of fear and her grapefruit perfume, tinged with wet earth, roll off her in waves. Does she regularly _visit_ Will in the mornings? Does she lie in Will’s bed at night, now that she’s deserted Hannibal’s? Did Will poison Alana against him and take her for himself?

( _Didn’t you do the same thing first?)_

“I got caught in the rain. What are you doing here?” Hannibal asks, rising from the floor.

As if sensing the bright vision of running Alana through the eyes with a pair of fishing rods, she goes still. Poor Alana, perpetually drawn to danger until she’s forced to face danger head-on.

“Will asked me to feed his dogs for the weekend,” she says.

The lightning current of jealous sickness in him turns hard and jagged, like shards of glass left behind when forked, electric light hits sand.

The weekend. No Will. No dinner tonight. No Abigail. He stepped off the cliff on the Eastern Shore and he’s still careening down, down, down, into the icy black water. Gasping on salt air with lungs that won’t hold anything. Limbs seized up. How much of Jack’s trap does she know? How poisoned is Alana against him? How blind is she?

“The weekend?” Hannibal says.

“Yeah.”

The image of Alana pierced through her blind eyes, dressed in only cascading cloth like Bathsheba, flashes again in his mind. What would happen if he did it? A shame for him; he’s still so fond of her. But he’s cut down people he’s fond of before. It never saves them. More of a loss for Will, really. A loss on top of that of Abigail, Beverly Katz, Georgia Madchen, Dr. Sutcliffe, arguably Alana…

Hannibal blinks, never having counted them up before. All but Abigail were incidental transgressions. Means of survival carried out on whims. Small moves in a great game between him and Will Graham. Hannibal had failed to consider that for a man like Will, emaciated of human connection and care, the string of losses would be no less than a massacre. _I only wanted to set him free._

 _Is it a surprise that I bit the hand that tried to lead me? Is it a surprise I bit yours when you did the same?_ Will’s voice murmurs near his ear. _Did you think I was a dog hungry for the taste of sheep I was supposed to protect and that you needed to unmuzzle me? That you could make me hungry for a taste?_

He did.

_Then why were you surprised when I bit you, Hannibal?_

“Um, should I tell Will you’re feeding them? I should get to work soon,” Alana says.

Will _left_ him. Will will return only to spring his trap, to confine Hannibal to life in cage, to lay him down with the dogs, a declawed lion.

“Where has he gone?”

“I don’t know, he just said he took Winston for a fishing trip,” she says. “I don’t really know what he’s been up to. I thought you might know better.”

Him and Will would have had dinner tonight with Jack, and for Will’s betrayal he would have cut Abigail’s throat.

His fingers itch to wrap around Alana’s neck, his hands there no longer gentle, her body no longer pliant under them. But all he really wants is to be alone. Even her corpse would be too much for him to bear now.

“I can take care of them while Will is gone,” Hannibal says.

“Are you — okay. Okay. Um, do you want to tell Will or should I?” she says.

“Whatever you like, Alana,” he says.

When she takes his dismissal at face value, nearly running back to her car, Hannibal breathes again. He collapses in the lounge chair closest to the door, all hideous mustard bouclé. He’s patient. He can wait for Will to return. He’s clever enough to avoid being snared in Jack’s trap now that he sees it’s shape.

( _And isn’t its shape sickening in a way you haven’t felt in nearly four decades_ ).

Hannibal runs his hand over the swell of the linoleum knife in his pocket. There’s nothing in him but a black expanse. An expanse of bottomless hunger, snow, ice, camp smoke, and the howling wind.

He’s patient.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and what's to be done about that?
> 
> (compulsively eating people who make you feel bad is not a good coping strategy, hannibal)


	5. Will

5\. Will

* * *

They park in a gravel lot off the side of the road to wait for the park to open.

“The dinner tonight...what’s going to happen?” Abigail asks.

“I won’t be there,” Will says, shrugging.

“I won’t be either,” she points out. “Just him and Jack Crawford.”

The strangest sensation crawls over him. Like his blood’s boiling. Like the fresh coppery stink of it spills out and fills the air.

_We could leave now. Tonight._

The rotten, sour taste of poisoned lamb blooms on his tongue. Did he really want to leave this life behind? Did he really want Jack to die? Did he really, despite the last shred of sanity left in him, want to go with Hannibal even without Abigail?

( _Yes, you did._ )

They’re leaving everything behind, him and Abigail. They’re leaving everything stained with blood. Everyone. Hannibal. Jack. A collapsing trap. Freddie and Alana as loose ends; two women dedicated to cracking things open to look at them in the light. Jack’s plan won’t survive in the light and Will will drown with him.

He’s already been accused of murder. What he did to Randall Tier, every second after he threw the shotgun aside, was murder. Only his dogged streak of (criminal) practically has a chance of saving him there. No one but him and Hannibal _know_ what Will did and all the evidence was well-disposed. But, all things said, Jack does know. He’s looked the other way and enjoyed the rewards of blindness.

Freddie is a whole other animal. Entrapment and a likely murder charge after being accused and acquitted of four murders spells prison sentence. He has one card up his sleeve for Jack, but none for Freddie that end with her alive.

Who’s left to Abigail when Will is gone? Hannibal, who terrified her into running from him? Jack, who would hang her for survival? Alana, who would smother her with kindness he’s not sure Abigail understands? Will’s no better, sure. But he sees her now. He wouldn’t want anyone to ask _him_ what he’s done to survive (stolen a watermelon, broken a thumb to escape prison transport, softly kidnapped his psychiatrist, aimed a gun at the head of said psychiatrist twice, sent a killer after him, concocted an entrapment plan and ate Randall Tier with his eyes locked on Hannibal and...well, ok, not all of that was _survival)_.

No one could call him innocent. They might make good company in hell.

“Can I take Winston for a quick walk?” Abigail asks, pointing at the trail sign.

Will sighs. “Good idea. Don’t get into trouble, you don’t have a phone.”

Abigail gives him a sarcastic salute before slipping out of the car. With Abigail tucked into one of Will’s waterproof jackets, hood hiding her inky hair, her and Winston disappear into the trees. She knows her way around woods; he’s not too worried about her.

With his charges gone, Will checks his phone to find a text from Alana about half an hour ago confirming the care of his dogs and a quick, **_hope you’re ok._**

He says, **_That’s what the river’s for._**

 ** _My bullets were gone,_** she replies a little while later.

He can’t help a smile. Of course they were.

 ** _Check the loose floorboard under the bed upstairs. I won’t need them,_** Will texts.

**_I’ll swing by before work this morning._ **

A fitting parting gift for Alana: a box of bullets.

Will slumps in his seat, head resting against the window. Abigail’s words ring in his head. _Some places are stained. Some people too._ The ground under Will is so slick with blood and he can’t tell whose it is. Can’t tell who stained everything. He should have stayed in Louisiana fixing boat motors. Stayed away from Jack. Never let Hannibal Lecter crawl into his mind like he belonged there. Like there was a space up there in the shape of him and, no matter what world Will lived in, Hannibal would find it.

He wants to blame Hannibal.

_(You can only really blame yourself.)_

Absently, he thinks about how Abigail will need new clothes. He hopes she’s ok with a thrift store because he doesn’t know where the hell to buy a nineteen-year old girl some clothes. He tries to imagine taking her to the mall. It’s absurd enough to make him laugh.

His eyes close only for a few minutes, his brain floating off untethered with the first tendrils of a light doze, when his phone vibrates in the cupholder. It sounds like a goddamn chainsaw at a funeral. Alana’s name combined with the early hour — before her drive into work — compels him to pick up.

“Dogs ok?” he asks, in lieu of a proper greeting.

“Will,” says Alana, breathy and shaky. “Hannibal was at your place this morning.”

_Shit._

“Are you alright?”

“I didn’t look upstairs because he was there. He...he said he’d take care of your dogs.”

“Alana, breathe, please. Since when are you scared of Hannibal?”

A heavy, steadying exhale washes over Will’s ear. “He...he looked like he’d hiked to your place. The mud. He...he looked like he hadn’t slept. He had _stubble._ I mean, I never saw him with anything less than a perfect shave when we were —”

“Alana,” Will warns.

The thought of Hannibal openly disheveled, openly _anything,_ in front of anyone sends a flare of annoyance through Will.

_(Anyone other than you.)_

“Sorry, I’m babbling, you don’t want to hear about that sort of thing. He — he was sitting on the floor with your dogs. He looked...I couldn’t help this feeling like something awful had happened. Like he was in shock or _something._ I wanted to get out there. I didn’t feel like I was supposed to be there.”

Abigail. He found out Abigail was gone. He’d searched for her either around the cliff house Abigail described or around Will’s house.

“Ok. It’s fine. He can take care of the dogs if he wants.”

The dogs are hostages now, but deep down Will knows Hannibal would never hurt them.

“Do you know what’s going on, Will? When are you coming back?”

Will remains silent on the phone.

“Will?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you...are you coming back? Is this part of the trap, because if it is, I think this whole thing has gone way too far and —”

“I’m done, Alana,” Will says, cutting off the rising pitch of her voice.

“Done with what?” she asks.

“Jack’s plan. The whole thing.”

“Why? What changed?”

And isn’t that an impossible question to answer? An impossible stream of thoughts and feelings to explain? That Hannibal had slipped into Will’s head at his most vulnerable and rearranged all the furniture, then piece by piece tore down the crumbling house? That Will had made it so fucking _easy_ for Hannibal to strip Will of his sanity and credibility and what he thought was friendship? Because hadn’t Hannibal been toying with him? Tossing him around to break? Laughing at sensitive, traumatized little Will Graham who never had friends, who never knew his mother, whose daddy drank too much and spent all his time at the boatyard?

Will promised a reckoning. He’d spun Hannibal the same trap of friendship and understanding. His catch had bitten. And Will...Will didn’t want to reel him in.

Because the man he’d known from before was still there. He smiled while unwrapping butcher paper. He bandaged Will’s bruised knuckles. He spent hours with Will in quiet company. _We could leave tonight. No one else would have to die._ And Will dreamt about those surgeon’s hands again, like he did the night Hannibal saved the man in the ambulance. Dreamt about dicing carrots shoulder-to-shoulder in the kitchen. About sharing whiskey on Will’s front porch as the dogs ran across the field.

There he’d sat at dinner, lamb on his plate, vulnerable belly laid out to Will’s fangs. _Come with me. I want you more than I want blood._

If he never eats lamb again it’ll be too soon.

“Jack’s a good enough man to let this consume him. He can’t stop until he’s finished what he started, until he understands everything. Get out while you can. It’s what I’m doing,” Will says.

“It seems like you’re saying you’re not a good man,” Alana says.

Fucking _therapists._

“You remember when I broke out of prison and came to your house to see the dogs?” Will asks.

Alana’s breath shudders. “Yes.”

“You were terrified of me.”

“You said you could kill me before the officers outside my house could come up the stairs, Will. Of course I was terrified,” she says.

“You were scared before that,” Will says. “You saw a killer.”

“I saw someone sick and confused and Hannibal kept trying to help you when you didn’t want help. When you were manipulating all of us. When you sent a killer after him. I don’t understand any of this. I don’t know what you did to Hannibal to make him so blind to you. To make him so _obsessed_ with you.”

Will sighs. “Don’t try to understand this. Be blind, Alana.”

“You know what I think? I think you don’t want anything or anyone between you and Hannibal. I think you want to shake off Jack and me and Freddie Lounds and get to Hannibal yourself,” she hisses.

Every damned day he wishes he’d strangled Freddie Lounds then dumped her in the Baltimore Harbor. That’s a good place for bodies. Marina workers find them all the damn time.

“I’m putting _distance_ between me and Hannibal,” Will says. “You said our relationship is destructive. Well, congratulations. There’s no relationship anymore. He’ll be safe from me. You all will be safe from me.”

Alana growls in frustration. “What happens when Hannibal finds out Freddie Lounds is alive?”

“He already fuckin’ knows,” Will laughs, cold and despairing.

_I would forgive you._

_(I know of your transgression against me.)_

“Will —”

“Goodbye, Alana.”

He hangs up the phone.

When Abigail comes back with Winston, brows furrowed at the sight of his pale, harrowed face and trembling hands, all he can do is swing open the driver’s side door to plant his feet on solid ground and bury his face in Winston’s fur. He reeks of wet dog and leaves streaks of muddy paw prints on Will’s pants.

He doesn’t know how long he sits there, murmuring nonsense in Winston’s ear.

“What happened?” asks Abigail.

She’s in the passenger seat, giving him the privacy of pretending he’s not falling to pieces.

“Alana called,” Will says. He runs a hand through his drizzle-damp curls.

Going around to the back seat, he towels off Winston’s muddy paws. Clean, Will shuts the door behind Winston, settles back in the driver’s seat. “Hannibal was at the house when she went to feed the dogs. Freaked her out. Though I think I freaked her out more by telling her to get the hell away from Hannibal and the trap and everything. That I’m getting away.”

All the sounds of the forest and drizzle muffle. Abigail watches him, one hand on her door handle. Wary. Sighing, he gives her shoulder a small squeeze.

“You asked about the dinner,” Will says. “It was supposed to be trap for Hannibal by me and Jack.”

“He found out,” she says, cold horror creeping into her voice.

“Yeah, Hannibal found out,” Will says. “He asked me to go with him two nights ago. He didn’t...didn’t even want to kill Jack.”

An odd expression crosses Abigail’s face.

“What did you want? Do you really want to see him behind bars?” she accuses as he shuts the driver’s side door. Her eyes — unnaturally vivid, wide as a doe’s, the color of a bluejay — are cold and flat. “Were you really on Jack’s side that whole time? We were supposed to go to Florence together.”

He huffs, turning his face away from the sting of accusation. “If I was on Jack’s side, would I really be here?”

“If you were on Hannibal’s side, would you be here?” she shoots back.

“Would you?” he says.

Her hand moves unconsciously to her jacket pocket, where Will knows she keeps a slim folding knife. “I’m just trying to survive,” she mutters. “One parental figure down, two to go.”

Will bites down on the tip of his tongue to keep himself from saying anything back.

He puts the car into gear and merges smoothly onto the road. They don’t speak as Will navigates the hilly, winding mountain road. Over a one-lane bridge crossing a dark, sparkling river, his phone vibrates loudly with an incoming call in the cup holder.

“It’s Hannibal,” Abigail says. “Are you going to pick up?”

“No,” Will says.

The call ends. Somewhere, three hours away from here, Hannibal will be hearing Will’s voicemail recording.

He turns the phone off, and for good measure, pulls the battery out.

“So that’s why you have a Blackberry,” Abigail deadpans.

“Jack might be able to pull call data to triangulate my position. Rural areas are more dangerous for that since there are fewer towers. Less signal bouncing,” Will says.

“Is this Crime 101?”

He grins. “More like ‘How to Get Away with Crime 101.”

“What’s on the syllabus, Professor Graham?”

“It’s more of an unstructured seminar,” Will says. He shakes his head as his smile slips. “I shouldn’t be encouraging this.”

“You shouldn’t do a lot of things, but if you’re not supposed to do them, might as well do them well enough to never get reprimanded,” says Abigail.

“A very Hannibal philosophy,” he replies as they pull up to the park station.

Will slides his phone and battery into the chest pocket of his flannel shirt and gives Abigail a quelling look. He rolls down the window, smiling tiredly at the Park Ranger. Will points out the green sticker on his windshield, and then is waved on through.

“Have a good vacation!” says the ranger. He smiles at them and Winston, who has stuck his nose between Will’s ear and the open window, scenting the air.

They park out front of a large white trailer that’s marked as the camp office, and sit in silence listening to the quiet patter of rain.

“I still can’t believe you’re alive,” he whispers, finally looking back at her. Her gaze is slightly unfocused, pointing somewhere in the direction of the large wood-shed with a sun-bleached sign outside saying ‘$2/bundle.’ “I keep thinking I’m going to blink and you’ll be gone.”

“It doesn’t really feel real,” she says.

“What’s the last thing that felt real?”

Her eyes meet his, quick and sharp. There’s something on the tip of her tongue, but she bites it back, and with a wobbly smile, says, “I don’t really know for sure.”

She’s lying, but he lets it slide. “Well, let me know if it ever starts feeling real again,” he says, and throws Abigail the car keys. “Let me get a cabin.”

The door to the camp office squeals when opened. Will winces at the noise and the fluorescent lights inside, which buzz and faintly pulse. He puts his glasses on to block some of it out, unwilling to have a fit here in front of the middle-aged woman with dyed blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail popping gum behind the till.

The last thing he wants is a flashback to the BSHCI and all the inevitable bad roads of memory that leads him down.

“One cabin, dog friendly,” he tells the lady. Penny, as her name tag reads, gives him a coy smile and taps something out on her 90’s era retail computer with her short red nails.

“How many nights, honey?”

“Just one,” he says. Her tan ranger’s shirt has short ginger hairs on it. Cat seems more likely than dog.

“That’s fifty bucks,” she says, and pulls out some paperwork, marking things quickly with a pen. “River’s closed for swimming, dogs need to be leashed, wood’s outside and please use the designated fire pits.”

“Thanks,” he says, handing over his credit card, then a few bills for firewood.

He’ll pull out some cash for when they’re on the road, but for now he isn’t worried about leaving a paper trail. He signs the paper she slides over to him.

“Thanks, sweetheart,” says Penny. “Camping alone?”

“Family trip,” he smiles, and heads back out the door as fast as he can.

Out in the drizzle, papers and cabin key tucked under his jacket, he can breathe again. No more fluorescent lights. No more thinking about his old cell.

If Hannibal ends up behind bars he’ll end up in some luxury suite of a place where he gets to read and draw and occasionally eat a celebratory exquisite meal. Because he’s filthy rich, stupidly charming, and far too well respected, he’ll never see the inside of Will’s cell. He’ll never have to sleep in the reek of mold and piss and whatever Miggs was doing. He’ll never have Chilton threatening to tube-feed him if Will doesn’t start eating again but the food is awful and he can’t stomach it because he _threw up Abigail’s ear_ and _he’s been eating them_ and the threat of being force fed is barely enough to make him stomach it.

He wanted Hannibal behind bars. What he wants now is murkier. Scanning the parking lot for a black Bentley, he thinks, _my name is Will Graham. It’s 8:46 am. I’m in Savage River State Forest. Abigail Hobbs is alive._

He’d like to know when this is all going to feel real again. When it isn’t going to feel like a he’s trying to outrun a tsunami. The water has receded, and he keeps looking back for the wave.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am operating under two things: Will kept his murder of Randall quiet from Jack/there's only circumstantial evidence there (even though Jack is 100% sure Will did it), and Freddie never saw the bone suit.
> 
> thank you all for the lovely comments! I can be found on tumblr and on ironlotus' discord server under the same name. 
> 
> next up: gone fishin'


	6. Abigail

6\. Abigail

* * *

They settle into the cabin Will rented for the night. It smells musty, and Winston’s damp arrival doesn’t improve things. She can see why he picked a place like this. This is a vacation place, a place you return home from. If he’d gone to a motel, it would resign them to transience before they’d decided on transience.

She covers the two cots, with their plastic-covered camp mattresses, in the few blankets Will packed. Will’s flannel camping pillows — the kind you roll up and squish down into themselves with a drawstring — are green with a fish pattern.

He’s so...

She shakes her head, smiling.

“What is with the hick fisherman stuff?” she asks him as she settles cross-legged on her claimed bed.

Winston hops up with her, and she buries her face into the soft ruff of fur around his neck. He smells a bit better after Will toweled him dry, but he’ll need a bath if the drizzle continues. She wonders which of the five bottles of dog shampoo Will brought with him.

“It’s what people expect from someone who lives in an old farmhouse with seven dogs,” he says, truthfully. “And...and a lot of it is my daddy’s stuff. Reminds me of him.”

“Is he still alive?” she asks.

“No,” he says, averting his eyes.

“Oh,” she says. “When did...what did —”

He shakes his head, and she knows the thread of that conversation is over.

“I need to shut my eyes for a bit, wake me up if you want to go somewhere,” he says. With a groan, boots toed off and tucked under the camp bed, he sprawls out on his back. “Sandwiches from the diner are in my bag.”

He’s out almost instantly after shifting so his arm is slung over his stomach.

It’s probably weird to watch Will sleep, but there isn’t much else to do while petting Winston. She wants to crack open Will’s skull and see what’s inside that impenetrable, unreadable facade. What does he want? Who is he? Why is he doing any of this? How did he find her dad? Why did her dad kill those girls? Where do they go from here?

She dozes for a while, slumped semi-upright. Hazy memories of a rifle in her hands, of train rides tainted with the taste of bile in the back of her throat, of a cold knife at her neck and hot blood spilling out of it, of Will’s face and Hannibal’s face blending into one, of Will shaking in the cabin and nearly grabbing her before going still and blank-eyed, of Hannibal asking for a piece of flesh, of days and nights spent behind glass with the crashing ocean outside flicker behind her eyes.

When she rouses out of light sleep, she thinks about how she’s down an ear, how Will’s sleeping quietly. They’ve abandoned Hannibal.

Where does the difference between the past and the future come from?

She’s still too numb to really mourn Isabelle Grenier, the Michigan native off to pursue Art History at the Sapenzia in Rome. Isabelle’s life finishing a GED and wrapping up a few community college courses online was over before it ever started.

Abigail Hobbs is dead. Her whole family is dead.

She doesn’t know who she is now.

She thinks about the woman on the Eastern Shore, with her pickup truck and her horses and her sweet, round-cheeked face and her core of steel. She remembers her address. Maybe, when they settle somewhere Abigail can write to her. She doesn’t even know the woman’s name.

When Will’s breathing turns slow and even and a test thump of her boots on the cabin floor doesn’t elicit any response, she slips out of them into just her socks. With all the trained silence of a hunter, she creeps up to his bunk. No change in breathing. Slow, slow, slow, she slips his phone and battery out of his chest pocket.

When he doesn’t stir, she pads back to her bed and breathes again. When she turns the phone back on, the screen prompts a four-digit passcode. On the third permutation of the most worn numbers on the keypad, she’s in. All the missed calls and messages pop up in quick succession. Hannibal, Hannibal, Jack, Alana, Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack, Hannibal ( _even though the contacts just say Lecter, Bloom, Crawford — no one gets a personal touch here_ ).

Thumbing through outgoing and incoming calls and messages, he has, in fact, not contacted anyone except Alana Bloom.

A weight leaves her chest along with a long exhale.

“You want to read my browser history while you’re at it?” Will mutters.

Abigail freezes, but Will’s eyes aren’t even open and the corner of his lip turns up in amusement.

“Sorry,” she says.

He cracks one eye open, then chuckles. “I’m not mad. Good for you.”

“You’re not upset I don’t trust you?” she says, crossing the few feet of cabin to hand him the phone back.

“Means you aren’t stupid,” he says, scanning his messages and then taking the battery back out. “And for what it’s worth, I don’t know if I trust you either.”

“I trust Winston,” she says.

Will rubs sleep from his eyes. “Me too,” he replies.

“If you aren’t going back to sleep, can we do some actual fishing?” Abigail says. “It’s stopped raining.”

“You…want me to teach you to fish,” he says with a considering frown.

“Why not? You brought gear for two,” she shrugs. “My dad taught me to hunt. Hannibal taught me to cook. You can teach me to fish.”

“I, uh,” he blinks, sitting upright. He smoothes the front of his rumpled flannel.

“That bothers you.”

“When…when I thought you were dead, I dreamed about teaching you to fish,” he says.

“Afraid that real-life Abigail doesn’t measure up?” she accuses.

Shaking his head in exasperation, he shuffles over to the bags of fishing gear.

“You ever going to quit throwin’ your knives at me?” he says. She opens her mouth to respond, to say _I don’t know how to stop._ Nothing comes out. “Don’t answer that. If you want to go, we can go.” He throws her a pair of waders. “Double up on your socks. It’ll be cold out in the river.”

She follows Will’s motions as he steps into his own pair, slightly larger than hers: pulling them over her boots without falling over, buckling each strap over her shoulders, adjusting them here and there. They’re warmer than she expected. Heavy canvas and soft flannel. His expression softening, Will reaches out gently to tighten the shoulder straps so the bib isn’t hanging so low. Abigail lets him fuss around her. On his waders, the buckles are rusted, canvas worn and sun-bleached, and the rubber covered in waxy bloom.

“There ya go,” he says, smiling. “You can wear the jacket over it.”

“Yours are different,” she says.

“These are old. They aren’t lined. I used to take them out on my days off back in New Orleans.”

“You’re from Louisiana?” she asks, shrugging the Carhartt coat over her shoulders.

“I was born there, but my daddy and I moved around a lot. I went back for college and then I joined the New Orleans Police Department,” he says.

“You were a cop?”

She files that away to ask about later, careful not to gorge herself too quickly on curiosity. Is that where he’d learned to hunt monsters? Is that where he learned to think like them, to understand them?

“Mm,” he hums in assent, buckling a tan bag over a vest. “Grab Winston, will ya? I’ll carry the gear.”

They go down to the river via a marked trail at the edge of the woods backing their cabin without bothering to leash Winston. Tendrils of sunlight glimmer through the clouds, casting everything in sharp, cold light. Abigail imagines crowds on the trails and families swimming in the cold water in summertime, beer-drunk bozos jumping off the bigger rocks. But it’s spring, the trail is abandoned, and she’s bundled against the Appalachian air.

“I don’t…I don’t know how to stop throwing knives at you.”

“Your life hasn’t been stable for a while. You haven’t felt in control. I can’t really blame you for using the weapons you have left, even if they’re unkind. You can be real mean, you know that?”

He’s right. She’s suspicious. And she can’t help but be annoyed by the delicate distance, the _what do you want next, it’s your choice, I won’t get in the way_ but he means well. Hannibal had a firm hand. A vision. Will just means well. Maybe thats enough to stay alive.

“Sorry,” she mutters.

He clicks his tongue in displeasure. Winston takes the sound as some sort of command because he’s instantly at Will’s heels with his plumed ears pricked in attention, all his focus trained on Will’s face.

“Nothing I’m not used to,” he says, giving Winston’s ears an absent scratch. She flinches a little at the wound she dug in. “Not everyone is. Be careful who you’re mean to.”

“We never really spent any time together, did we?” she says.

Winston runs ahead on the trail, then circles back. Over and over again, never letting Will or Abigail out of his sight. His paws are black with mud. He’s easy to spot in a fluorescent orange bandana. The color reminds Abigail of early deer hunts with her dad, before she’d ever been given the rifle.

“No. We didn’t,” Will says. “I’m…not great at socializing. I didn’t…don’t really know how to talk to you.”

They dodge overgrown thickets of rhododendron, winding slowly downhill. The rain’s left the trail muddy enough to leave squelching boot-prints behind, but not so slick that she’s worried about sliding on her ass.

“Yet,” she says, softening at his honesty.

“I hope so,” Will sighs. “I’m um, still really sorry about Minnesota. I shouldn’t have taken you. I scared the shit out of you. Maybe if I hadn’t…”

He looks over to where her left ear ought to be under her hat. She gives him a watery smile and shakes off the memory of him sweating and blanking out all the way through their trip. It still makes her stomach twist. Old fear, new sympathy.

“Hannibal told me you were really sick,” she says, shrugging. “I’m still kind of impressed you figured it all out with your brain all inflamed like that.”

“Wasn’t really the best time of my life,” he grimaces. Briefly, his eyes flutter closed on a deep inhale of the cold, biting spring air. “When I got out all I wanted to do was be outside. It’s the little things. The smell of grass and leaves. Sunlight. A fresh breeze. Feeling real ground under my feet. My dogs.”

“You didn’t miss people?”

“Hah,” Will barks. “Being alone with my mind those months was, in some ways, a gift.”

Abigail looks up and a spark of understanding passes between them.

“Lonely,” she replies, “but still a gift.”

The trail ends in a rocky shore where the river is flat and shallow. It’s a quiet part, far from the falls and cocooned by copses of towering oak and hickory trees. Will ties Winston loosely to a tree on the bank.

“This is a good place to start. It’s wide and quiet, not too shallow. A few eddies too. The bank’s a bit more eroded than the last time I was here,” Will says, stepping carefully into the river, avoiding slippery rocks. Some kind of wren sings high up in the trees, too far off for her to see. It doesn’t sound like anyone she knows, so probably an eastern bird. “It was summer. The mayflies were out in full-force. I did some fishing down at Sang Run too — it’s about another half-hour west. There were red-winged blackbirds screaming in the reeds and a Great Blue heron competing with me for trout.”

Tentatively, she follows him in. The water through the waders feels strange, like she should feel ice water on her skin. Being dry and cold with water all around her is surreal.

“I like birds,” she says, even as something sour coats her tongue at the reminder of _Minnesota Shrike_. “My dad once took me up to the Northern Peninsula in Michigan. Up on Lake Superior. We were looking for Kirtland’s Warblers. I was ten.”

“Yeah?” he asks.

“They’re endangered. They only nest in a really specific kind of pine, and only on the lower branches. When the pines grow too big, they lose the lower branches and the birds can’t nest anymore. So people do prescribed burns of whole patches of those pine trees to keep their habitat,” she says. “The trees always have to be young.”

_(And isn’t that fitting?)_

“Do you miss it?” Will says.

She considers the question, wading in until the water comes up to her thighs. “No. I don’t think so. I was happy, but I don’t want to revisit it.”

The current pulls at her legs. She wonders what it would take for it to drag her under into its icy undertow. Maybe in a deeper part of the river she’d already be floating downstream.

“Holes in the floor of the mind,” Will muses, his eyes distantly scanning the surface the river.

“Something like that,” she says.

Will glances at her in mild surprise, as if he didn’t mean to say it aloud. Whatever he was thinking about, he shakes it off. With a tight smile, he hands her a fishing rod. He keeps his own tucked precariously under his arm.

“It’s not just a line with a hook at the end you stick in the water, is it?” she says, testing the balance in her hand. She holds the rod steady while watching Will fuss with the line.

“Not so simple, no,” he says. He points along the fishing rod. “But it’s not rocket science either. You’re mimicking their prey using the flies and the motion of the line, which means you have to understand what the fish likes, what kind of prey it wants and how it moves.”

“Isn’t that fitting?” she says, dry.

Will just looks at her, brow arched.

“This is a pretty standard fly rod and reel. I mostly fish trout in streams and rivers like this, so mid-flex with a lighter-weight line,” he bends the tip of the rod and it springs in the air a few times before steadying. She feels the oscillation in her hands.

“Do you only fish trout?”

“Mostly. Up here its a lot of bass and trout. Sometimes you get bluegills. Smaller fish, lighter line,” he says, pointing to the thickness of the bright green line in the reel. “Daddy and I used to fish redfish off the Gulf in Lousiana before we moved to Biloxi. I did a bit on my own when I went back. You need a much heavier line for that.”

She nods. “Like the difference between a .30-06 Springfield and a .223 Remington. Big game versus small game.”

She could still feel the weight of her smooth, compact Ruger Hawkeye rifle her hand. Smooth laminate. Easy balance.

“You know your rifles better than me,” he says, raising a brow. “Give me a double-barrel shotgun or a pistol, I’m happy.”

“You aren’t a deer hunter,” she says with a shrug. “You’re a fisherman.”

The corner of his mouth twitches up. “My game was beer bottles on a fence, kid.”

She thinks about the ear-splitting crack of that first shot into her father’s shoulder, and the nine shots after. “And people,” she says.

Any humor on his face vanishes. His jaw works like he’s chewing over what to say. In the silence, the stream gurgles on. Wind rustles through the high tree branches.

“I, um, never discharged my gun on the job. I was on the police force for six years,” he says, solemn as the grave and a bit shaky. He doesn’t meet her eyes. “Not even when someone had a knife in my shoulder and I had my gun to their stomach.”

 _I wouldn’t fire my gun to save myself, but I did to save you,_ she hears, without him having to say it. Never fired his gun on the job, a teacher for years, likely a compromised rotator cuff. She didn’t understand why he’d emptied a whole clip into her father before. She’d been so angry at him for killing her dad, and even angrier that an FBI agent had done it so shoddily, but that second anger bleeds out of her. Down the river.

She wants to know everything. She wants to know how he found her father. How he understood him.

He points to the bright green line in the reel. “Backing.” A clear line tied onto the end of the backing. “Line.” Another line tied to that. “Leader.”

“And we have to tie on the fly?” she asks.

“Yep.”

* * *

They don’t catch a single damn fish and leave the river mid-afternoon completely frozen from standing in the water for hours. Her arm is sore from endlessly casting until Will was satisfied with her form. Her heels ache like she’s walking on knives. It’s a thankfully brief walk back up to the campground, even if Will stops by the camp store to grab s’mores ingredients with a toothy, boyish grin.

They strip out of the waders and Will builds a fire in the designated metal ring in front of their cabin. Abigail brings out the camp blankets and they sit across each other on rough-hewn wood benches, blankets curled around shoulders. While eating chicken salad sandwiches from the diner, they thaw around the fire in silence. It’s easy, even if it isn’t exactly comforting.

Winston eats a dish of chicken and rice and carrots from a plastic container which she suspects Will cooked himself and brought from home in the little cooler.

After dinner, Will feeds more logs into the fire and Abigail pokes around the edge of the woods for long sticks. They break open graham crackers, Hershey’s milk chocolate, and marshmallows. Abigail imagines Hannibal’s long suffering look at the sight of them ingesting so much processed food.

Winston sighs with his head on Will’s thigh as they roast marshmallows over the fire and amicably argue about the technique. Will, to no one’s surprise, thinks lighting them on fire and then blowing them out as quickly as possible is the correct method, to which Abigail responds with a rant about burnt, uncooked marshmallows and how it’s clearly best to gently toast them.

With her marshmallow slowly browning, she asks the question they’ve both been avoiding all day. “We’re only here one night. Where do we go from here?”

He eats his burnt marshmallow right off the stick.

“I know some people down in New Orleans who can get you papers,” Will says.

She imagines cypress-shaded swamps and long beaches along the coast, all bathed in sticky heat and storms.

“Can we stay there?” she asks. “I mean, my first request is that we get a motel next because I want a shower and central heat. But when we get down there, can we stay a while?”

“Do you want to stay together?” he asks.

“Like…”

“I mean, do you want your own place? You’re an adult, you don’t really need me directly hovering over you,” he says.

Her mouth opens and closes, no noise coming out for a few long moments. _You’re an adult._ It always floors her to remember that she’s an adult. That he isn’t going to kill her for being an adult. That he’s going to get her papers and is okay with letting her go. Will doesn’t have any of her dad’s smothering, fixated love. If anything, he keeps her at an arm’s length as if he’s either terrified to connect too soon or finds family so foreign that he doesn’t know how, even if he wants to.

Maybe that says something about him.

“I was alone for months at the cliff house,” she says, layering her sticky marshmallow — perfectly toasted and gooey on the inside — over a piece of chocolate before squishing it down between two graham crackers. “I think for now, we could stay together?”

“Ok. You sure you want to go to Louisiana? You might hate it. You’ll be burnt to a crisp and probably sweatin’ bullets the whole time,” Will says.

If they’re apart she can’t get the answers she wants. If they’re apart and Hannibal finds her, there’s no one to hold hostage.

She knows, deep in your bones, that Hannibal could split Will open with a knife, but he could never kill him.

“I guess we’ll find out. Maybe that’s a good thing. It won’t be Minnesota or Maryland,” says Abigail. “You know your way around. And, it’s a part of you I think I want to understand.”

He blinks. “If he decides to look for me, that’s where he’ll look.”

“Maybe by the time he catches up, we’ll be ready.”

“In that case, you’ll have to help me with my aim,” Will jokes.

“And you’ll have to keep up that unstructured seminar,” Abigail says, biting into her s’more.

He chuckles. They slip into the most comfortable silence they’ve shared thus far. While she burns two out of the next three marshmallows she roasts, Will scratches Winston behind the ears.

“How do you feel about quid pro quo?” Abigail asks.

“Fair,” says Will. “You can ask first.”

“What…what was it like, being sick? I asked Hannibal about it…he said it was encephalitis. Brain swelling.”

His lips thin. “Anti-NDMA receptor antibody encephalitis. My immune system started attacking receptors in my brain, leading to acute inflammation in the right hemisphere. I was, uh, really fuckin’ sick. I had seizures. Gaps in memory. Hallucinations. I had fevers so high I nearly cooked my brain. I once went sleepwalking in the street in winter, barefoot and in my boxers. I once woke up on my roof. I was losing my goddamn mind.”

“Was that all before you…before you and me went to Minnesota?” she asks, remembering how he’d looked like death warmed over on the plane.

“Right before? No. The headaches and fever and stuff started before I ever took the case.”

“But that was months.” She frowns. “If you were sick I’m surprised he didn’t smell it on you.”

“What?” Will says, his voice gone hoarse.

“His sense of smell? He said he once smelled cancer on someone before they were diagnosed. He would have smelled it on you.”

There’s a long, heavy silence.

“Oh, that _asshole,_ ” Will hisses. “I always wondered how and when he figured it out. I _knew_ he knew before the scans.”

“So you went to a doctor about it? They didn’t find anything?”

Will gives a strained, startled laugh that disturbs Winston from Will’s lap. The dog whines once, and curls up at Will’s feet.

“Abigail, he, ah, induced seizures and hallucinations with light therapy and drugs. He knew I was sick, tried to convince me it was metal illness, sent me to a buddy of his at Hopkins who lied to me about my MRI results, then murdered him to cover it up. And then he used that to frame me for murder. Your murder.”

The dark suffocates her, through and through. Hannibal’s words from a visit long ago re-contextualize. _Will will be remade by his experiences. Surviving will bring him into a new stage, will bring a new beauty from the extreme. As you survived. As I survived._ She believed Hannibal. Believed he was in perfect control. Abigail wonders what chance there was that Will’s condition hadn’t been survivable. How easily he could have been killed in a random accident or succumbed to the fever. It’s a recklessness she never expected from Hannibal, and makes her glad she’s not at the cliff house.

“I, uh, I read about it. That you threw up my ear.”

He looks pale and queasy at the mention of it. She wonders how often it’s hard for him to keep food down.

“Yep.”

“I’m sorry.”

Will swallows hard. “He ah, he drugged me. And um, put a tube down my throat.” She can barely hear him over the crackling fire. “I remember…I remember how he brushed my hair from my face. It was like…”

Will scrambles off the bench and, shaking, nearly stepping right on Winston, bolts for the tree-line before he vomits. Her s’more turns to ash in her mouth. She throws the remaining bites of her into the flames, unwilling to stomach more.

She’s not the world expert on romance, but she’s pretty sure that when your feelings for someone get to be too much for you, violating them with an esophageal tube and then sticking them behind bars isn’t conducive to having your feelings reciprocated. No fucking wonder Will set up a trap to get him imprisoned. She should have made Hannibal watch some rom-coms with her when he came by.

Created her own unstructured seminar. How To Be In a Human Relationship 101. Prerequisites being: you are either the Chesapeake Ripper or the only man who can catch the Chesapeake Ripper. Lecture one on the syllabus: if the person you love has a life-threatening illness, don’t commit medical malpractice to exacerbate it in order to witness the glory of their becoming. Lecture two: don’t use the girl you mutually saved, whose father you mutually killed, to cultivate a relationship with said object of affection.

Abigail curls the wool blanket tighter around her shoulders while she waits for the awful retching to stop. Eventually, Will staggers back to the cabin and slumps down on the porch steps, head between his knees. She grabs a water bottle and brings it out on the porch with Winston at her side. Winston nudges at Wills arms with his wet nose. Abigail sits shoulder-to-shoulder with Will, who is a furnace under his slightly clammy flannel. With a wavering smile, he takes the water bottle.

“Thanks,” he says, wrapping the other end of her blanket over his shoulders. His voice is hoarse from throwing up. “Sorry.”

He sips the water she handed him, quietly grateful.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asks.

He shakes his head. This close, he smells like sweat and dog and the deep, biting scent of his deodorant. With another breath she can pick out the faint hint of coconut dog shampoo. He’s weird in a totally opposite way from Hannibal but with equal magnitude. Then again, she gutted a guy, buried him, and then unburied his body. Maybe none of them are any authority on sane living.

“You’re thinking. Loudly,” Will says.

Abigail flushes.

“I was thinking about how you barfed up my ear but the thing I find weird about you is that you use dog shampoo. And _that_ says something about how weird _I_ am.” He looks at her like he has no idea what to say to her, and that, for once, feels honest. It feels fine. “Do you seriously wash your hair with dog shampoo?” she says.

He averts his gaze to the stair tread under his feet.

“I don’t have to answer that,” he says.

“You had, like, five bottles of dog shampoo in your shower and a bottle of Dove conditioner. You use dog shampoo on yourself.”

He looks down at his crossed arms, a wry smile twitching over his face.

“I’ve already got so much, seems like a waste to get some for myself,” Will says, defensive, and then, something breaking in him, he laughs. “And it smells nice.”

He laughs again, and she can’t help but laugh along.

“We should get inside. Get some real sleep,” Will says.

“Yeah.”

After the fire’s put out and their trash taken out to the bear proof dumpster, they turn back into the cabin. Will wipes down Winston’s muddy paws. They take a quick trip in the dark to the camp bathroom for evening ablutions (Hannibal had a skincare routine, Will probably washes his face with bar soap).

He must have been infinitely braver of the cold and the numerous enormous spiders crawling the walls to come out with freshly washed hair. The walk back down the gravel path to the circle of cabins is lit only by the light outside the bathrooms. Looking up at the pitch-black sky, Abigail can make out colors amongst the stars. Velvety blue-black, veins of white. The Milky Way. It’s beautiful.

Back in the cabin, Will turns out the light and slips into his cot. Winston curls up at Abigail’s feet on hers. The sound of his soft breathing lulls her brain into a mindless quietude, like standing in the stream. Except instead of the clean scent of spring air and mountain water, she’s in a musty cabin that reeks faintly of wet dog.

“I’m guilty of you, Abigail. Alive or dead, I’ll always be guilty of you,” Will whispers into the dark, as if he’s talking to himself. “And even if I hadn’t killed your dad or really killed you, I’m still guilty. His culpability and mine — they’re the same. Because on some level...on _some_ level I knew what he was doing to me.”

“You let it happen,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“I know what that’s like,” she says. Will sighs in soft acknowledgement. “Can you forgive him?”

“That’s the worst part. I think…I think I already did.”

 _Oh,_ she thinks. _That’s what all this is about._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An even longer chapter for y'all. Abigail's a bit chatty after being cooped up and alone for so long. 
> 
> Thank you again for the wonderful comments on the last chapter! I love everyone's feedback. Special shout-out to [TheodoreAurore](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheodoreAurore/pseuds/TheodoreAurore) for being an amazing sounding board. I highly recommend their writing. 
> 
> Next up: Hannibal has dinner with Jack.


	7. Hannibal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal has dinner with Jack and receives a phone call.

7\. Hannibal

* * *

He’s patient. 

He feeds the dogs from the labeled tupperware containers in Will’s rather barren fridge by the gray light of morning. They eat in six neat little lines by the kitchen peninsula. He bears little thought for Alana.

With his own clothes too thin and rain-soaked to be any good outside, Hannibal rummages through Will’s spartan selection of t-shirts and flannels before finding something that fits. When he searches the coat rack suitable outerwear, a few of Will’s usual weatherproof jackets are gone, presumably with him. He pokes around a bit more and finds an old, flannel-lined waxed canvas jacket hanging off a hook in the mudroom, hidden under a ratty towel Will uses to dry the dogs. He catches the faded scent of Marlboro’s, whiskey, and diesel fumes preserved in wax. It fits Hannibal well. As he calls the dogs to the door, he considers how he doesn’t even know the name of Will’s father.

_(The coat suggests Mr. Graham is dead. It’s the first piece of evidence towards either state. How little you know.)_

He swaps his ruined dress shoes for a pair of old rubber boots with teeth marks on the toes that pinch slightly and takes the dogs around the edge of Will’s property. Sodden brown grass squelches underfoot. The air is crisp with cold and full of the scents of damp earth, decaying vegetation, and new spring growth. The oaks and maples show the first buds of March, while the hickories, with their deep, craggy bark, remain stubbornly dormant. Lazily, he picks up suitable sticks and throws them for the dogs. 

He could leave tonight. Write a note for Alana and Jack and even Will. Tell Will’s neighbors to check in on the pack until he returns. Simply…slip away into a new life under a new name. Gallivant across Paris and Monaco and Florence. Take in the sights of Majorca and Milan. Spend weekends in the Alps.

Alone. 

He’ll be alone. Abigail is gone, whether she’s alive or dead and Will…Will didn’t want to come with him. Will betrayed him. Will sat at his dinner table, focused and sleek and intense, under Jack Crawford’s instruction. 

Briefly, he considers taking Buster with him on a grand European tour, though all in all, slipping away while Will’s gone is hardly an exit that would match Will’s betrayal, even if he does leave a body. He wrestles a drool-slick stick out of the shaking terrier’s mouth and pats him fondly on the head.

“I am afraid you would not appreciate Bâtard-Montrachet or skiing, my friend,” he says to Buster. “Nor do you have an eye for Renaissance art.”

Buster smiles up at him, quickly crowded out by the bigger dogs angling for the stick. He throws the stick again, and Buster takes off, followed by the rest of the dogs. At the edge of the woods, Hannibal looks back towards the house and imagines Will’s boat on the open ocean, far from solid shores. Surely, feeling stood up is a phenomenon experienced by other people. Surely, melancholy emptiness, a rocky, thrashing motion like a boat unmoored in a storm, in the wake of Will’s absence and Abigail’s disappearance is banal. Is beneath him. 

With a deep exhale, he starts back towards the house.

“How many times do you have to try to cut me out of your life before you accept it?” Will asks, appearing beside Hannibal in that shot-through green jacket and sweater. A stain of blood seeps out of Will’s shoulder.

“Accept your influence?” Hannibal replies.

“Accept that you can’t bear being alone anymore,” Will says. “That you love me and it’s entirely out of your control.”

“I’m not enough of a lovesick fool to let you live through your betrayal,” Hannibal says, avoiding a particularly deep muddy spot in the bare brown field.

“You don’t want to kill me. You want to gut me with a blade the way you were gutted by love. You want me wounded and scarred and haunted by you so that I have no choice but to hunt you,” Will says, sharp and caustic. He pauses. Frowns. “Is that the only way you can imagine the future? One of us hunting the other down? Like dogs chasing after a stick?”

Hannibal sets that thought aside. It isn’t the way he imagined the future, though Will’s betrayal turned all those dreams around and soured them until a hunt became the only option. He’d imagined showing Will Florence. Abigail too. He’d imagined nights in conversation around a fire, music, drawing, and dancing. He’d imagined dinners. He’d imagined Will in fine cotton-silk shirts. He’d imagined Will in less. 

He towels off muddy paws at the mudroom door and then slips back into his own clothes, cutting off that poisoned train of thought. 

“I should be back tonight,” he promises the dogs, petting them all in turn. 

A rendition of Salomé on the classical station gets Hannibal through the hour and a half drive back to Baltimore. It’s longer than usual because he takes US-29 to avoid an accident on I-95, which is mercifully deserted, even if he hits more stop lights along the early parts of the highway than he would like. 

_Ah! ah! wherefore didst thou not look at me? If thou hadst looked at me thou hadst loved me,_ Hannibal thinks. _Ah, Iokanaan, Iokanaan, thou wert the man that I loved alone among men!_

At home, he turns the shower to scalding and scrubs the scent of rain and mud off him. Of dogs. Of Will. Dressing again, he forgoes a shirt and waistcoat for a cashmere sweater. The overall effect with the beginnings of a day-old beard is sleeker and more dangerous than his usual appearance. Stripping back some of the veil — cryptic mimicry as Will called it — feels right. It doesn’t matter that neither Abigail nor Will can join him for dinner tonight. He’s adaptable. He can have a pleasant dinner with Jack Crawford. 

He descends into the kitchen, puts on the Goldberg Variations, begins preparing dinner. 

Jack rings the doorbell at exactly seven. 

“Jack,” Hannibal says. Objectively, he knows Jack’s staring baldly at the casual sweater and the silver beard, but part of him still feels like he’s in the muddy, rain-soaked clothes Alana found him in. Naked, instead of sleek and deadly. 

“Woah, hey. Beard’s new,” Jack says, staring.

“I just missed a shave today, Jack,” Hannibal says. “Please, come in. I’d hate for a guest to linger on my doorstep.”

“Thank you,” Jack says, shrugging off his coat to hand off to Hannibal. He catches the scent of Bella’s perfume, chemo, and a lingering trace of marijuana on Jack’s coat. 

“Is Will here? I didn’t see his car, and he wasn’t answering his phone,” Jack asks.

“Ah—” says Hannibal, pausing on the way to the coat closet. He turns briefly to Jack. “Will has absconded for the weekend for what seems to be a constitutional on the river.”

Jack is struck still. “He’s gone fishing?”

“I imagine that’s why his phone keeps going straight to voicemail,” Hannibal says, politely veiling his disquiet as being put out by inconvenience. Why wouldn’t Will have told Jack about a change in plans? “He is likely out of reception range. I only discovered it this morning when I ran into Alana at Will’s house. He saw fit to inform her to care for his dogs but did not see fit to inform you or me, it seems.”

Jack frowned. 

“You were at his house this morning?” Jack asks.

Ever the interrogator. “Ah. Yes,” he says, pulling a wooden hanger out of the coat closet to hang up Jack’s camel coat between two of Hannibal’s own. Hannibal wets his lower lip. He can’t fully hide how disturbed his weekend has been, starting from the scent of Freddie Lounds all the way to Will’s sudden absence. Some version of the truth, some vulnerability should do. “I...received some bad news, I’m afraid, and sought out Will’s company. A...sympathetic ear.”

He turns back to Jack, gesturing towards the dining room. Jack’s face flickers for a moment, torn between sympathy, curiosity, and apprehension.

“May I ask what kind of news?” Jack says, tilting his head as if to say _after you_. 

He follows Hannibal to the dining room, hackles up like a stray dog. The sharp scent of anxiety changes the stronger Oud notes of Jack’s cologne and overpowers the lingering traces of Jar. 

“A dear friend’s daughter passed,” Hannibal says, then frowns to find his voice noticeably raspy. He clears his throat and pulls out a chair for Jack in the dining room. “Suicide.”

Jack breathes out. “That’s...I’m sorry, Hannibal.”

“Thank you,” he says. He gives Jack a tight smile. “I’ll bring out the food.”

Looking far-off, Jack nods tightly. Alone in the kitchen, Hannibal plates out crisp duck legs and bitter greens, artfully arranged over a bed of white beans.

“I must apologize in advance for being rather poor company,” Hannibal says, placing the confit duck in front of Jack. 

“We could have rescheduled,” Jack says, adjusting the neat maroon tie at his throat. 

“Just because I am not my usual self does not mean I do not appreciate your company, Jack,” Hannibal says. 

He pours two glasses of chardonnay, then settles across the table from Jack. The first few bites and sips linger in a haze of tense silence, with Jack glancing up every so often with a calculating look in his eyes. 

“I’m not Will, but if you wanted a sympathetic ear,” Jack says, pausing to take a sip of wine. “I could listen.”

“Suicide is the enemy,” Hannibal says, not looking Jack in the eye. He busies himself cutting another meticulous bite of duck, the bitter greens and vinaigrette complementing the fatty cut. “I find it difficult to reconcile the strong young woman I knew, brimming with life and potential, with one who would end her own life.”

“I know what you mean,” Jack says. 

Their eyes meet briefly across the table, both remembering Bella.

“Yes, I suppose you do,” Hannibal says. 

“How did her father — your friend — take it?” Jack asks. 

Hannibal chews slowly, savoring and considering. 

_(He trusted no one but you and you put him in a cage for crimes he didn’t commit. You made sure he thought he killed and ate her. And now you’ve lost her too. Your desires for family made you foolish and impulsive and blind. You were blinded by love.)_

“He is devastated. He feels betrayed. And above all, he blames himself,” Hannibal says. 

“Have you talked to him about it?”

“I am afraid it’s too soon,” Hannibal says. 

Jack takes another bite, his face — all scars, as Bella once said — relaxes for a split second of culinary pleasure, before hardening again. 

“Bella’s…decision was a way to regain control. When and how she died.”

“That decision was made in the face of a certain and harrowing death,” Hannibal says, watching Jack wince slightly. “Isabelle had no such reasons.”

But as he says it, he remembers Abigail’s note, which he’s taken to carrying around in the inner pocket of his suit jackets. 

_I’ve been living on borrowed time._

_I want to take back what was stolen from me._

_This is the only way I know how._

_I hope some other world is kinder on me._

Was the life he’d planned for them in Florence so terrifying to her? Or, did she in a preternatural bout of cleverness sense Hannibal’s plan to cut her throat?

“Sometimes it feels so senseless,” Jack says. “After all the murder I’ve seen, it’s strange to experience death outside someone’s…design. As Will says.”

Something in Hannibal leaps and flounders at the sound of Will’s name in passing conversation. Hannibal turns his fork and knife over in his fingers before setting them back down on his plate. _Fidgeting. How banal._

“It’s God’s design,” Hannibal says. 

“You really believe that?” Jack asks, his heavy brows furrowed. 

“God is not merciful,” says Hannibal softly. Will Graham is not merciful.

“No,” Jack agrees after a time. “Bella wants to talk to you again.”

“How is she?” Hannibal asks. 

“Weak. She doesn’t eat much except after having kush. I bought this god-awful ice shaver to make crushed ice since she doesn’t want to drink water.”

It’s a harrowing image. Bella, dragging herself through a brutal chemotherapy regime, eating shaved ice, while her husband loses himself in an extrajudicial scheme to expose the Chesapeake Ripper. No thought to his own life, or her braving treatment to survive another day for his sake. 

“The slow melt is easier on a turbulent stomach,” Hannibal says. Ice chips are a staple of surgery recovery wards everywhere. He’d fed them one by one to Abigail after she’d woken up from her coma. 

“Yeah. Will said it would help for a while,” Jack shrugs, taking another subdued bite. 

Hannibal’s fork stalls for a moment. 

“Did he? Rare of Will to share.”

“Can’t say it was encouraging, thinking about Bella being only able to stomach ice chips and Carnation instant breakfast by the end,” Jack says. “But to know someone’s been through it too…Watching someone you love fade out of life is a pain I wouldn’t wish on anyone. It’s the worst pain I can imagine.”

Hannibal thinks about the old, waxed canvas coat hanging up in Will’s mudroom.

“There are tea blends known to help. Soups that she might be able to tolerate,” Hannibal says. “If she would be amenable, I can send something over.”

“I’ll ask her,” he says, reluctant. 

“Please do. I am very fond of Bella. If I can ease her suffering in any way…” says Hannibal. 

Jack hums in neutral acknowledgement, turning his attention back to the meal in front of him. 

“Digestif?” Hannibal asks as he stands to clear the plates away. 

Jack shakes his head. “I should get home…to Bella.”

“Of course,” says Hannibal. 

He sets the plates in the sink and returns for the empty wine glasses. 

Before he helps Jack into his coat, he pauses. They hover in the foyer.

“Did you send Will Graham to my door, Jack?” Hannibal asks, cutting into the thick tension hanging between them.

Jack lets out a short sigh through his nose, like he was waiting for this question all evening.

“I think we both know,” he says carefully, “that Will Graham only goes where he wants to go. He has...a way of maneuvering everyone exactly where he wants them.”

_It was Will’s idea,_ Jack doesn’t say. Will’s idea but surely Jack’s cajoling. He only wishes he could see Will hand in all this as clearly as he can see Jack’s. Hannibal offers Jack his coat but refrains from helping him put it on. The distance is for Jack’s sense of safety, not his own. At close range and with the scalpel tucked into his sleeve, Hannibal would have an advantage. From here, Jack’s gun does. 

They both know that. 

“Do you feel maneuvered, Jack?” Hannibal asks. 

Jack’s lips thin. “Do you?”

_(Yes.)_

Hannibal presses his tongue against the back of his teeth. His fingers itch to hold the scalpel. _Promise me you’ll save him. Save him for me._

“Perhaps it is my fault once again putting faith in Will Graham. I must not have learned my lesson even after he slit my wrists by proxy. Fool me once, fool me twice. What do you say of a man fooled thrice, Jack?”

“Shame on both of you,” Jack says, the planes of his face hard. 

The door shutting behind Jack sounds like a tomb being sealed. Hannibal stands there in the foyer as silence, bone-deep, cold, and aching seeps into him. He does the dishes in silence. He eats pistachio gelato out of the tub leaning against the refrigerator in the dark, thinking about when he’d caught Will’s scent in the kitchen and found him pointing a gun to Hannibal’s head. The music from Salomé plays in his head. 

_I am athirst for thy beauty; I am hungry for thy body; and neither wine nor apples can appease my desire._

The gelato turns to stone in his stomach. He puts the tub back in the freezer. The dogs will need him and with the late hour, he can get to Wolf Trap in an hour, maybe less. With no real conscious deliberation, he packs a go-bag. 

The dogs go mad with delight at the sight of him, and just like earlier that morning, their presence and easy natures soothe the raw wire of his heart, stripped and sparking. He feeds them, lets them out, wipes paws, and pets them from the ugly mustard lounge chair. The last time he drove so long and got so little sleep he took Will to Minnesota. Will had slept in the passenger seat of the Bentley, soothed by the lash of rain and gentle swish of windshield wipers. Soothed by the total safety he’d found in Hannibal’s company. 

Before he’d seen betrayal. 

_I promised you a reckoning._

He’s never felt quite so worn from not sleeping. Not wanting to fall asleep in a chair and wake up with a sore neck, he settles on Will’s bed, his hand on the linoleum knife. The pillow holds a sharp, deep scent that’s entirely Will. It makes lying here worthwhile, even if Will really ought to get a better mattress. This monstrosity can’t do anything for the man’s damaged shoulder. 

_(You were there for the bullet-wound, but the sight of an unknown, deep, ragged, silver scar next to it on that lovely, gently freckled shoulder makes you furious and covetous at once. You want to mark him. You want to mark him so he can never, ever forget you. So you can never be mundane or uninteresting in his eyes.)_

He slips into sleep. 

* * *

_Keep your wrists flat_ , Hannibal says.

Abigail smiles, self-deprecating. _I know._

Her scarf is a blood-red silk sash around her throat, and with the gentle tinkling of piano keys like rain, he thinks of her bolting out into the wilderness. Lungs burning. Feet pounding. Red ribbon streaming in the wind as branches pursue her. He catches her, steel to tender, scarred skin, and she goes down gasping, throat opening red with blood as she gasps and gasps, aspirating on her own life’s blood. He can’t tell if the ribbon around her neck had turned white after her escape; it’s stained with blood now. 

He presses his hand to her throat. 

_“I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you in this life,”_ he says, but the voice doesn’t come from his own throat. 

A flash of white-hot pain lances his belly. 

Abigail buries her knife deep in his gut, her sapphire eyes wide in horror. She shoves the knife up and he collapses down, down, down, blood coating the back of his tongue. The hands around the knife go slack. Blood pours out of his mouth as he holds the gash of his stomach under the knife wedged just under the point of his sternum. Abigail’s eyes stare at the night sky with empty glassiness. 

The stars swim above. He thinks he can see Orion’s belt. 

“I promised you a reckoning,” Will says, crouching over Hannibal. Starlight halos his curls. He’s a vision. 

He doesn’t feel Abigail’s knife. He doesn’t feel fresh blood pouring out of him, steaming in the cool night air and watering the damp earth. He doesn’t feel his skin turning cold and clammy in shock. But he feels Will’s eyes.

“Beautiful,” Hannibal chokes out. 

“It’s funny,” Will murmurs, running gentle, callused fingers over Hannibal’s cheekbone. Hannibal lets out an undignified noise — a sort of base, animal whimper of need. “It turns out you’re mortal after all.”

* * *

Hannibal wakes gasping, his skin unbearably clammy under his sleep shirt. 

His cold, fluttering hands confirm that his organs are still where they’re supposed to be, but he still feels the phantom pain of being split open. Of Will simply watching. Just a nightmare. He can deal with nightmares. 

In his own home, waking after a bittersweet nightmares where he bled out from his wrists under the cold, bored gaze of Will Graham ( _“I don’t find you that interesting.”_ ), he’d make some chamomile tea with a touch of lavender and sit in front of the fire in his bedroom. He’d wander the halls of the Norman Chapel in Palermo, descend into the candlelit catacombs, and exit to find himself amongst the halls of the Sorbonne or some other cherished place. 

He’s not in his own home. He’s in Will’s home in Wolf Trap, Virginia and it’s 3:58am. So Hannibal lies there, in sheets that smell like Will, and watches the sky turn from black to gray. 

He cooks the dogs more food according to the recipe scribbled on the back of a receipt from a butcher down in Manassas and makes a breakfast of coffee, eggs, bacon, and some fresh fruit for himself alongside them. Trying to reconcile Will’s mix of copper-bottomed vintage aluminum cookware and ‘90s stove (it’s gas, so at least there’s a god somewhere) with a vision from _Larousse Gastronomique_ is a challenge, but doable.

Will’s knives are old, mismatched, and dutifully sharp. The coppery tang of blood and the putrescine scent of fish scales cling to the butcher-block counter. Everything is old and secondhand. Everything is meticulously cared for. Will Graham: always collecting and presiding over strays and other cast-off things. Hannibal understands the compulsion. Randall, Abigail, Margot, and, for a time, Will. He has his own fondness for vulnerable things. This thought gives him pause. Perhaps Will sees only the things he holds in common with this collection, and not that which sets him so, so far apart.

He does the dishes in Will’s shallow double sink, remembering Will, shaking, covered in mud and scratches showing him the ear in his sink amidst dissolving aspirin tablets. Suds fly as he scrubs. The water scalds, stings, bites, and still Hannibal finds blood under his nails. Copper and heat through his fingers as he holds Abigail’s throat closed. 

He takes the dogs out again midday, walking them through the sprawling park for miles and miles. He visits the edge of a stream. He cleans muddy paws with a towel and washes Buster in the tub upstairs when he rolls in a patch of particularly pungent fox pee at the edge of the property. He wanders around the house like a ghost. Like he’s wearing Will’s skin as a shroud. 

What does Will usually busy himself with? 

How does he while away the hours amongst the tired snuffles of napping dogs?

Books, boat motors, fly tying?

With a stir of whimsy, Hannibal tilts back the lid of Will’s piano. Prepared for that particularly disappointing off pitch from the last time he’d tested out the piano, he hits middle C. Hannibal frowns. The key rings with perfect, hollow, absence. When had it been tuned? 

Dusting off the bench, Hannibal sits. His fingers test out the keys and find them all correctly pitched. And with the gentle echo of a memory that he can’t be sure is his, something nudges him to play. 

“Nocturne in C-sharp minor,” says Will. A memory-Will, dressed in just his sleeping pants and a dark plaid, barefoot. 

He leans against the wall to the right of the piano, staring off into the gray-ochre landscape. 

“Yes,” says Hannibal. “I would ask you how you knew, but you are a figment of memory.”

“Of imagination,” Will corrects, wrapping his arms around himself and pulling his bottom lip through his teeth. “And I would ask you why you thought to play this. I expected Brahms or Bach.”

“Imagination,” says Hannibal. “It felt right. Like—”

Will shifts. “Me.”

“Tell me, when did you tune your piano?”

“When did you last check if it was out of tune?” Will asks. 

“The first time I came here,” he replies. “To feed your dogs.”

Will nods, jaw set.

“The Lost Boys case,” Will says. “You wanted to know if I played. And once you compared the discordant sound of untuned notes to everything else in my house — old, passed down, meticulously cared for — you guessed I didn’t play after all.”

“When did you have it tuned? Did Tobias Budge inspire you?” he asks, continuing through the piece. “The song that played in your head?”

Will shrugs. “Couldn’t tell you.”

“Do you play, Will?” Hannibal asks.

“I can’t tell you that because you don’t know the answer. You could have asked me,” says Will, mournful. 

“I would like to,” Hannibal says. “I was teaching Abigail to play.”

“How well that turned out.”

“Things don’t turn out well or poorly. They just happen. They either meet expectations or surprise. I choose to find joy in surprise rather than dissatisfaction with an outcome not to my liking.”

“So you aren’t simmering with regrets?” Will laughs. 

“No,” Hannibal says. 

“Liar,” says Will. He slips out of the room and disappears.

Will doesn’t come home, and all Hannibal’s calls go to voicemail. 

( _You don’t panic. This isn’t panic.)_

After dinner with hounds for company, he unearths Will’s record player and a collection of old records. He flips through John Coltrane, Chet Baker, Etta James, Johnny Cash and the Dixie Chicks before settling on a Nat King Cole record. He’s delighted to find the record player in perfect condition.

_(You would never normally take these liberties, but you’re spiteful and desperate to soak up every last thing of Will Graham there is to have.)_

He sleeps and wakes from nightmares where Will bleeds out and doesn’t wake again and sleeps again, moving through the creaking old house like a restless cat. 

“You’re having nightmares about losing me,” Will scoffs.

Hannibal stills, turning slowly from the back window in the kitchen. Will leans against the refrigerator, arms crossed lazily. He’s in that salmon button up with the sleeves rolled up and his usual gray twill pants, but he’s barefoot like before, hair curling boyishly over his forehead. Longer than it is now. 

“I am,” Hannibal says. 

“Would you have felt anything had the encephalitis killed me?”

Hannibal frowns. “It was not advanced enough...”

“I was sleepwalking!” Will snarls. “I woke up in the middle of a road. Woke on my roof. A car accident or a broken neck or exposure. My _life,_ Hannibal. And now you walk around my house pretending you _miss_ me.”

This Will can’t bear to look at him, flushed with righteous fury. Glossy brown curls, dark blue eyes, and pale. Like a Boticelli. His jaw tenses with a deep hurt. Achingly lovely. 

“I don’t _pretend_ ,” Hannibal insists. 

But Will’s gone. Max noses at his hand and Hannibal scratches her behind the ears. 

* * *

He falls asleep in the mustard lounge chair sometime early in the morning and wakes a little after eight to his phone ringing. 

“Dr. Hannibal Lecter speaking,” says Hannibal, refusing to let any sleep bleed into his voice. 

“Hello Dr. Lecter, this is Kade Prurnell. I am an investigator at the Office of the Inspector General in FBI Oversight. I apologize for the early call, but I would appreciate you coming in to Quantico at your earliest convenience,” she says. 

Hannibal pushes his tongue against the back of his teeth in distaste. He has a spare passport in his go-bag; he can be on a flight out of the country within an hour if he gets to Dulles quick enough.

“May I know what this is about, Ms. Prurnell?” Hannibal asks.

“I have the terrible job of informing you that Jack Crawford of the Behavioral Analysis Unit, based on no evidence, enacted a plan to entrap you on suspicion of you being the Chesapeake Ripper. Agent Crawford has been immediately placed on leave pending a full inquiry. Our conversation will, I hope, afford the FBI a chance to formally apologize for this gross misappropriation of the department’s resources and to find out your side of the story.”

Hannibal blinks. 

“And what of Will Graham?” he says. “His accusation of me no doubt brought Jack Crawford to my door.” 

It brought Will himself, always Jack’s man. 

_(Will Graham only goes where he wants to go.)_

_I had plenty of chances to spring a trap, Hannibal,_ Will says in his head. _How much of his man was I?_ Hannibal shoves the voice away. 

“I believe we can talk about that in person, Dr. Lecter,” says Prurnell. “What is your earliest convenience to meet?”

Jack, forced on leave. The trap exposed. Will gone. 

What has Will Graham done?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal quotes Oscar Wilde's Salome
> 
> Theo rightfully called this the Hannibal Simp Chapter. Pistachio gelato and tense dinner with Jack are all the works of our insane conversations.


	8. Will

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will and Abigail drive down to Knoxville, TN and discuss God.

8\. Will

* * *

_...I haven’t been to church in seven years,_

_but with my fingers hooked in the gills_

_of a thrashing white trout,_

_I know that we unmake the fish_

_the same way God made him._

— Shastra Deo, [_Mississippi Sound_](https://sundoglit.com/deo/)

* * *

“Hold ‘er with your right hand, tha’s right, just behind the fin,” says Beau, voice low and gravely. Will’s hand is small around the slippery trout, but he holds on tight, his daddy’s knife in his other hand. He poises the blade right behind the fluttering pink gills. Revulsion and fascination war in Will as he watches the fish gasp. Drowning on air. “Now take the head off, clean and fast. Don’t make ‘er suffer.”

His daddy’s gnarled, calloused hand covers Will’s smaller one, and with one sharp motion, a wet _thwack,_ the head’s cut off. The twitching muscle goes slack under his left hand. Will watches the blood run out from head and body both like a red mirror, seeping into the stained cutting board. For a moment, the blood’s coming from a deep slash under his hands, pulsing and gasping from a pale girl’s ruined neck. He blinks the picture away. Among the red, bloody fish meat, he sees veins and arteries, still weakly pumping blood. White vertebrae. Red spine. Pin bones.

“She was alive,” Will says. “And she’s just meat now.”

It’s July in Mississippi, the sun only just starting to dip behind the trees, and they’re at the edge of a river, tent set up and a cookfire crackling behind them. Will’s cheeks are hot from sunburn where his hat didn’t quite protect them, even though Daddy smeared chalky Coppertone sunscreen all over his face and ears, lamenting how Will got all that pale skin from his momma. 

Beau ruffles his son’s curls, then throws the fish head into a waste bucket. “Now we gotta scale her and gut her.”

Will knows this part. Tail to gills, he scrapes scales off with the backside of the knife. Steady and smooth. Slice the belly. Pull out the organs. Cut out the spine. When Will’s produced two filets, Beau tosses them in some flour and salt and pepper. He throws them into oil on the cast-iron skillet he’s had smoking on the campfire. Will watches the fish cook and thinks about the fish drowning in air, gasping for oxygen. Mouth opening and closing fruitlessly. Pink gills moving. 

But it’s not the fish anymore. It’s Daddy in his bed, old afghan draped over his thin chest. He’s hooked up to an oxygen tube and canister in his trailer out in Mobile and he can’t catch his breath. The Saints are playing on the old television at a low murmur.

“Come on, you need to drink something,” Will begs him, holding out crushed ice on a plastic spoon because the taste metal puts him off. He’s not thirteen anymore, all coltish limbs and over-long curls. He’s twenty-three, fresh out of college and the police academy. Clean-shaven and short hair combed neatly. “Come on, Daddy.”

“Can do it mysel’,” he wheezes, taking the spoon with trembling hands. The bones of his wrists stick out. Delicate. Fragile. Daddy’s never been fragile. 

Daddy lies shrunken, straight gray-brown hair and light beard gone patchy from chemo, broad shoulders shrunken, calloused and grease-stained hands withering. Will hates it. Hates how senseless it all is. 

Will sighs in relief when Beau finally works through the cup of crushed ice. “Thanks, Daddy,” he says. 

“You gotta go back to work, son,” he says. “Can’t keep lookin’ after me.”

“Don’t even think about it,” Will warns.

“You gonna make me eat that god-awful chocolate shit?” he says, glaring half-heartedly at the box of Carnation instant breakfast packets. Will’s dreading making Daddy the chocolate slurry, but he won’t eat anything else. On a good day he can eat rice pudding or dry cheerios. “What I wouldn’t give for red beans and rice. Good barbecue.”

Will grips the blanket next to his daddy’s hand. He can’t quite make himself reach out and hold that hand, even though he should, even though in a few weeks he’s going to regret not doing it. 

“You can’t taste any of it. And you know that’ll just make you sick,” Will says. “You said you didn’t want to go back to the hospital.”

“Damn right,” Beau rasps, then coughs. 

And so Will stays in the hot trailer in Mobile, police uniform shoved at the bottom of his duffel bag until Daddy’s too weak to stay there. Until he needs the hospital again and thank Christ almighty the Union’s got decent insurance and Daddy’s on Medicare now because otherwise Will would be tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket for the chemo infusions and cocktails of prednisone, antiemetics, and morphine. 

“Don’ worry about me, son,” is the last thing Beau says before his lungs finally give out.

* * *

Will wakes up panting for breath like a land-drowned fish, a lead weight in his chest, sick and dizzy. It takes him a moment to blink away the hospital and the scent of chemo and fish guts. He checks his watch when he finds his phone still turned off. _My name is Will Graham, I’m in Savage River, and it’s 4:29 am._ Will rubs sleep from his eyes. He hasn’t had a dream about his daddy since he’d bought the house up in Wolf Trap. He’d lain on his camp bed in the living room that first night seized with the awful pang of loneliness that came with wishing Beau could have seen him. He’d have been proud of the house. Proud of Will. 

He glances over to find Abigail, curled up tight on her cot, her back to him. Winston lies in the space behind her knees, his ears perked towards Will even as his eyes stay closed. This still floors him if he lets himself think about it. Winston took to Abigail as easily as he did to Will, as if she were a part of him, when he’s still resolutely wary of Alana, let alone Hannibal. He wishes the rest of his pack was here too.

As quiet as he can, Will dresses and slips out of the cabin to make coffee with his percolator and a propane camp stove. The sky is clear and deep blue, sunrise still about an hour off. With frozen fingers, Will sets up the stove on the picnic table out front. The next steps are automatic. Add water from a canteen to the lower chamber. Add coffee grounds to the upper one. Screw it together tight. Heat it up slow, no steam. 

This too reminds him of Daddy and he bites down on his lower lip to keep the shaky tendrils of those memories back. He doesn’t want to think about that here. He has to think about where to next and Abigail and what he’s leaving behind, not about Daddy making fry ups and teaching him to cast a line and singing Georgia on My Mind on the church piano after a Sunday potluck and showing Will all the parts inside the hood of their ancient F-150 covered in grease and buying Will books for 50 cents at the library sales every chance he got and him laying in that hospital bed so thin and sick. 

Will swallows hard around a lump in his throat. He turns off the stove. Coffee steams the air as he pours himself a mugful. He warms his frozen fingers through the enameled steel, holding it close to his face so the steam warms him there too. Thinking about Daddy makes him think about Bella. 

Will had taken two weeks off work, beat duty and ambition be damned, after Daddy collapsed working at a boatyard in Mobile and the CT scan showed masses in his lungs. After that, Will went back to work but drove out from New Orleans every three weeks for each infusion until Beau got bad enough not to be able to do much himself. Will always wondered what killed him faster, the chemo or the cancer. If he had to do it again, he’d put in for long-term leave and spend those last four months with Daddy, even if all he could do by the end was listen to Will read Melville or Twain or Steinbeck in a too-hot trailer or watch the Saints on TV. Maybe Will would take him somewhere nicer, like the Keys. 

Will sips his coffee, listening to the birds waking. Wind gently rustles spring-bare and groaning branches around. In the quiet oblivion of pre-dawn, Will hangs suspended above everything, watching the options unfold and unfurl in his head. If he were Jack, he would have taken the bereavement leave and taken Bella somewhere nice. 

His phone sits in his thigh pocket like a stone, taunting. 

_Can you forgive him?_

_I think I already did._

He takes another sip of coffee, letting bitter liquid slide over his tongue. Just a hair too hot. Thawing him from the inside out. Slowly, as if he’s loading a shotgun, he slides the battery back into his phone, clips on the backing, and turns it on.

From Jack, there’s, **_Still on for dinner tonight? Pick up the phone, Will. Will, where are you?_**

 ** _Will, I have spoken to Alana and will be caring for your dogs this weekend. I would have appreciated a forewarning on rescheduling our dinner with Jack. Enjoy your trip,_** writes Hannibal.

Alana just says, **_need some space this weekend after what we talked about. Going to visit family. Don’t call._**

Ignoring the long list of texts and missed calls and voicemails, he punches in a number he never thought he’d dial willingly. With his finger hovering over the call button, he lets himself wonder if what he’s about to do is murder or mercy. 

“It’s Will Graham,” he says when Kade finally picks up after the seventh successive call. 

“Jesus, Graham. It’s 5 am on a Monday. What the hell did you wake me up for?”

And so he spills everything. 

Well, not _everything_. Jack picking him up at the BSHCI. Ice-fishing and veiled conversation. Suggestions that Will get close to Hannibal Lecter. Misappropriation of funds to torch an effigy of Freddie Lounds and put her in protective custody. 

He doesn’t talk about Randall Tier. 

He doesn’t talk about Mason Verger. 

His teeth are too bloody for that. These things exist best in the realm of plausible deniability and, other than circumstantial, there isn’t any _evidence._ If that’s enough for Kade, well, he plans to throw his phone in a river, swap the plates on his car, and go on the lam with Abigail.

“What game are you playing, Graham?” she says.

“It’s not a game, and that’s the problem. Jack’s plan is going to get a lot of people hurt. It doesn’t need to be that way. Jack can spend time with his dying wife,” says Will. “And I can have some honest to god peace for the first time since that man dragged me back into the field.”

“Mr. Graham, is Hannibal Lecter the Chesapeake Ripper?” she asks.

Will pauses, licking his lower lip as he thinks over what to say. 

“The Ripper is done and buried,” he says, measured. “I don’t have any evidence linking Dr. Hannibal Lecter to the Ripper. Circumstantial or real. The FBI should probably apologize to him for skirting procedure and accusing him without evidence.”

“It was your accusation, Mr. Graham,” Prurnell says. 

“It was.”

“Do you retract it?”

“I am no longer accusing Dr. Lecter of being the Chesapeake Ripper,” Will says. “He fits aspects of the profile. A profile isn’t evidence.”

Kade Prurnell hums on the line, quietly considering. “Are you lying to me Mr. Graham?”

“No,” says Will. Sins of omission and all that. “If the Ripper is still at large, you do it right and wait for him to give you something actionable. Bring things into the light. He works in the shadows, and he’ll get you there. Jack scooped me up the second I walked out the BSHCI and brought me into the shadows. I let him. That’s on me. I should have packed my bags that day and left with no forwarding address.”

“What about Jack?” Prurnell says eventually.

“He should be with his wife,” Will says on a long exhale. He drums his fingertips along his thigh, watching a pickup truck drive past. “Bereavement leave followed by retirement. Firing him and opening a formal investigation will call into question every conviction he’s ever gotten, and you know what that means.”

Kade makes a displeased sound. “Or your convictions, right?”

“Well, no one can un-convict Garrett Jacob Hobbs or Tobias Budge, at least,” Will chuckles. 

“Lounds will need airtight NDAs,” says Kade, supremely unamused.

“She will. Dr. Bloom too.”

“And what are we to do with you, Mr. Graham?”

“I’m getting as far away from the FBI and this mess as I can.”

“Do you need me to tell you not to leave the country?”

“No, I’m just goin’ home. I’ll tend my resignation formally. Thank you all for that, by the way. A ‘sabbatical.’ Don’t know anyone else who spent a sabbatical hopped up on sodium amytal and SSRIs, let alone behind bars and in a straightjacket,” he says. “But don’t worry. I’ll even go down a pay grade. I can’t expect my GS-13 retirement after all that. I won’t cause a fuss.”

“I will need statements and interviews from you.”

“I can send you whatever you want in writing. Or if you want to send someone out when I’m settled, I’ll talk to them.”

There’s a tense pause. 

“Stay in touch, Mr. Graham,” says Kade. “If you drop off the map completely, I’ll have no choice but to put out a warrant. I’m still tempted, depending on what I hear from everyone else involved. I still think you’re playing a game, but resignation from you and Jack is the smoothest option for the FBI.”

Of course it was. She didn’t want this sort of thing about the FBI out in the open, certainly not after Jack’s testimony at Will’s trial.

“I have no intention of painting the FBI in a bad light,” he says. 

“You’re leaving me a mess, Mr. Graham. Again,” Prurnell says. Will’s blood boils. He’d love to scoop out her chest cavity and stuff it full of every smoothed-over scandal her fingers had been in. 

_(Will Graham will always be my friend.)_

“Please, Kade, that first mess was my trial. You’re lucky I didn’t sue the FBI over that. Improper filing of overtime, bare-minimum clearance, insufficient psychological screenings. Jack cut a lot of corners.”

“Don’t remind me, Mr. Graham,” says Prurnell.

“You’re lucky you can forget, Kade. I can’t.” Will sighs. “And Kade? Jack is a good man. He cares. It’s all very personal to him, and the Ripper is the most personal of all of them. Don’t crucify him. Just let him be with his wife.”

“I’ll tell you the truth, Mr. Graham, if I had found out any other way, there would be warrants out for your arrest as an accessory to entrapment, and one for Jack as well for entrapment,” says Kade. Will’s stomach lurches. “As it stands, you’re giving me a chance to cut Jack off before it blows up in our face.”

Maybe he doesn’t have to throw out his phone and change his car plates after all. 

“I couldn’t let this go on in good conscience,” Will sighs. 

“Frankly, that’s bullshit, Mr. Graham. You get roped up in Jack’s scheme — fueled by you, by the way — and then all of a sudden you realign your moral compass to come to me? I don’t believe it for a second.”

Will juggles what to say next, and decides that the truth will protect him best. He can’t afford an arrest anymore than he can afford Hannibal finding out about Abigail.

“What I’m about to tell you doesn’t ever leave your mouth, Kade,” Will says, letting himself sound appropriately frightened. It’s not even that much of a lie. 

“What am I about to find out?” she replies, wary. 

“It’s not my moral compass that was realigned,” he says. At least, not realigned in the way she thinks. “Just my priorities.”

“What kind of priorities could make someone like _you_ turn your back on a plan and disappear?” Kade sneers. 

Will bites back a sharp retort. If only he had some of the strange stuff Hannibal was made of that made people actually polite to him. 

“I found out I have some...unexpected family. I’m all they’ve got. I have to get out of here, have to take them far away from this,” Will says. “Jack took me out of the classroom and within months I ended up with a severe, untreated brain condition and I ended up in a hospital for the criminally insane falsely accused of being a serial killer. As soon as I got out, Jack scooped me up again. I can’t be in Jack’s orbit anymore. I can’t be in the Ripper’s orbit anymore, if he’s still out there. I wasn’t any good at protecting myself. I owe my kid better than that.”

The silence on the other end of the line hangs, heavy and funereal.

“Send me your report and a signed retraction of your accusation,” she sighs. “Take care of yourself, Mr. Graham. Stay away from the press.”

“No worries there. Take care of the public image,” he says, and hangs up the phone. 

He’s surprised to find the sky gray-pink. As he blinks around to take in the sight, the cabin door squeaks open to Abigail slipping out, ghostly-pale and bundled in her blanket. Her hair tumbles around her shoulders, loose from its usual braid and tangled from sleep. 

“Who did you call?” Abigail asks, wary. She meets him between the front porch and the picnic table with the skittish trepidation of a doe, each step of her unlaced boots measured and even. 

“Did I wake you up?” he asks, frowning at the deep circles under her eyes and the far-off haunted look in her eyes. Her lower lip is chapped and raw from where she’s been worrying it. 

She shakes her head. “I had a nightmare. You weren’t there and I…”

“I’m here,” Will says, giving her cold, shaking hand a squeeze. With a ragged exhale, she crashes into his chest. Will tucks her head under his chin, gripping her around the shoulders. He doesn’t know how to be good to himself. He doesn’t know how to be good to her. He hopes this is what she needs, because holding someone feels too much, too good, too fragile. He’s trying. God, he’s trying. “I have nightmares too. All the time.”

“Do they get better?”

“You get better at handling them,” he says, sighing. “Do you want coffee?”

She pulls away, wiping wet streaks from the corners of her eyes with her sleeve. Some wild, nostalgic impulse moves him to ruffle her hair. For a moment she freezes, blue-jay eyes wide and fixed on him, and he thinks he’s ruined absolutely everything they’ve built brick by fragile brick over the last 48 hours. She ducks her head, smiling. 

“Coffee sounds good,” she says. 

Across from each other on the picnic table they drink out of the same mug, passing it back and forth because neither of them feel much like going back in. 

“Winston probably needs to go out soon,” Will says. “And we should get packed and go get some real breakfast somewhere.”

Abigail nods. 

“Who did you call?”

He worries his lower lip. “Uh, the Office of the Inspector General. FBI oversight.”

“What?” she hisses. 

“Taking Jack out of the game,” he says, shaking his head to assuage her sudden tension. “Don’t worry about the FBI. Worked there, remember? Said I’d look after you?”

“Ok,” she says. “Ok.”

They wash up in the camp bathroom outbuilding, take Winston out for a quick mile-loop walk to offset the upcoming hours in the car, feed him a breakfast of kibble, and pack the Volvo back up. By the time they’re done, the sun peeks over the horizon. Will turns in the cabin keys and documents at the camp office, waving bye to Penny at the counter again. She’s wearing a tan baseball cap over her bleached hair this time, with bird pins on the brim. Will spots a cardinal, an osprey, and a few owls there as she smiles up at him. 

“No going back now, I guess,” Abigail says. The rental office recedes in the passenger side mirror. “It feels wrong to leave him behind. I feel like he’s right there, watching. Waiting. Like he’ll be there wherever we end up.”

“I know,” Will says softly.

She turns her head towards him. “He knows I’m gone now. He knows you’re gone. I wonder how he feels about all of that. If he knows we left together and why. If he’s going to miss us.”

Will’s brow furrows. _He’s going to miss toying with us,_ Will doesn’t say. If Hannibal thinks he cares about either Will or Abigail, he doesn’t care about them in a way that he understands. 

“We pulled the rug out from under him,” says Will, and turns the car towards the highway. 

Abigail is mercifully subdued that morning, favoring staring out the window and watching the red morning sun slide over the mountains over interrogating him again. Her long, black-brown braid snakes down her chest, carefully hiding her missing ear. Her gaze is far away. She’s bundled up in the same gray-red-green double-weight flannel she arrived in, though she asked for one of his clean t-shirts to wear under it. They’ll have to stop somewhere to buy clothes and toiletries and underwear and socks and such soon.

He wonders if she’s sulking, contemplating, or gearing up for her next barrage of questions and pointed incisions into the weak parts of his armor. It’s just as likely that she can’t hear very well in the passenger seat, since in any other environment she orients at his left. Either way, he soaks up the silence. Quid pro quo his ass. Hannibal must have taught her a thing or two, because she’s far chattier and _far_ more successful at prying things out of him than she was before...well, before. Maybe she’s got to cut something that’s not herself or a sacrificial stand-in for herself to keep her head above water. Maybe death is freeing that way. Maybe Will should give it a shot.

He wonders what Hannibal would do if Will staged a convincing death. It would need to be as banal and senseless as possible to cause maximum affront: a car accident or a boating accident. Boat would be best. He could drink enough whiskey to convince someone he’d stumbled and cracked his skull open. Blood, skin and hair planted on the railing, a trail of crimson spattered over the side of the boat, his documentation left aboard, Abigail taking him back to shore. Leave a tip for Freddie Lounds to find. 

She’d find him but no body, sure, but who survives falling into open water at night with a blood alcohol level that high and a head wound that bad? 

How dare something so banal as the ocean and sheer, drunk stupidity take Will Graham where Hannibal can’t follow?

_(There were so many times you nearly succumbed to acts of God instead of acts of Hannibal Lecter that you wonder if God too uncomfortably hungered for your company and wanted to smash you against the pavement just to prove that his feelings were real.)_

* * *

Two hours on the road, Abigail lightly dozing, they drive through Grafton, West Virginia. Will laughs to himself because of _course._ Of course he can’t escape the last year of his life, of course Hannibal still colors everything. Despite Will’s best efforts to cast him aside, Hannibal insists on bringing himself along. Maybe it’s because Will’s never truly made a real effort to evict him.

He thinks Hannibal tore some critical seam in him. With every mile between them, the odometer ticking on, the Appalachian mountains running by, some red thread inside Will unravels and unravels. Will swears his entrails spill out on I-68 behind them to leave a bloody trail for the thousand miles ahead. 

_(There’s a word for this but you can’t say it.)_

The endless road slowly fills in with morning work traffic. He keeps the public radio on to keep his mind from wandering too far, but low enough that it won’t wake Abigail. She stirs eventually, somewhere around the cloverleaf junction for US-19.

“Where are we stopping for the night?” she asks, voice thick with sleep.

“I was aiming for Tennessee, get the highways map out the side door, will you?” he asks. She shuffles through his maps until she finds the folded brochure, unfolding it to the mid-Atlantic area. “What’s a decent town in northern Tennessee? Or southern West Virginia?”

“Uh, Knoxville?” she says. “About how far away is that?”

“Knoxville’s about 8 hours away from my place, so that’s do-able. I’m too old to long-haul.”

“Didn’t you drive to Minnesota with Hannibal? That’s almost 20 hours,” she says. 

“Hannibal drove,” he says. “I don’t think he needs sleep or feels fatigue the way us mere mortals do. He certainly doesn’t have a fucked up rotator cuff that locks up on long drives. And as nice as this car is, it’s no Bentley.”

Reminding himself, he rolls his left shoulder to get some of the creeping stiffness out of it. 

“Is that from when you were stabbed?” she asks.

“Yep.” He doesn’t elaborate, even if he can see the questions all over Abigail’s face from the corner of his eye. “Map a route for us? What’s the next junction?”

“I think it’s the West Virginia Turnpike?”

“Hmm,” Will considers. “Toll road, no go. There another route?”

“We stay on US-19,” she says. 

“Ok. Good.”

“This would be way easier if you had Google maps.”

“We can get new phones in Knoxville,” he says. 

West Virginia is rolling hills and sad little post-industrial towns and old barns. Along the way, they drive past a yellow billboard that reads, ‘Jesus said: I am the WAY, the TRUTH, and the LIFE: no man cometh unto the FATHER, but by me.’

Abigail makes a small noise that could be a derisive laugh. 

“It’s all the same between cities. Highways and warehouses and Jesus,” she says. “The road to my dad’s hunting cabin had this big sign that said, _Be sure. Your sin will find you out_. Right across from another one that said, _Free Dirt_.”

Will snorts.

“Do you believe in God?” he asks.

“Do you?”

“Do _you?”_ he counters.

She sighs. “If he exists, it was pretty fucked up of him to make me the way I am. To make me so wrong my dad couldn’t bear not killing me.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you, Abigail. You didn’t make him kill. He decided to kill. Oh _fuck_ off!” Will swears, as a pickup truck aggressively cuts them off to overtake a semi. “That was fuckin’ stupid,” he mutters. “Sorry. It’s not your fault he killed, Abigail.”

“But he decided to kill because of me,” she says. 

“It still doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you,” he says.

“God always wants a sacrifice,” she says. 

“God’s terrific,” Will muses, with a private smile. “I was too skeptical for God.”

But skepticism didn’t matter when potlucks were free and parish preachers were cheaper than therapists, even if one was getting government assistance.

Abigail hums in assent.

“I never liked church. He wanted us to go. Wanted me to be...good. I’d take hunting with him over that any day,” she says. “Less judgement.”

Will opens his mouth, only to slam it shut along with his foot on the brake. The semi that the aggressive pick-up truck overtook changes lanes right in front of the Volvo. 

“It’s a two lane highway, you can’t fuckin’ be in the left lane,” Will mutters, gesturing angrily before he downshifts. The car jerks slightly at the rough gear change. He sighs. “Sorry. DC traffic gives you a complex.”

“Road rage?” she asks archly. “Maybe you should cool it, in case you get pulled over?”

Will grins, and grudgingly puts on the cruise control. Even more grudgingly, he changes lanes.

“Well, you’ve got highways that end in residential streets that are strict 20 mph zones without signage about the speed drop. You can’t park anywhere. You’ve got the American Legion Memorial Bridge which is the only damn way to drive from Virginia to Maryland for a good thirty miles around and it’s a parking lot from 7am to 10am and then from 4pm to 6pm,” Will says, slowing down to let another car merge onto the highway. “Then you’ve got the rest of the Beltway, the 95 corridor into Baltimore, and, my personal hell, 395. If Hannibal didn’t have my appointment so late I would never have even made it. I sat in traffic for that man for two hours every damn week and he had the nerve to frame me for murder.”

“Tell me how you really feel,” Abigail says. 

“Sorry,” he says, and tries to focus on driving instead of how close all the cars and trucks are. “We were talking about God and judgement before I started cussin’.”

“Mm,” she says, “Church is a great place to feel judgment.”

“Did you feel judged for your thoughts or your actions? In church?”

“Thou shalt not murder,” she says, with a pained little smile. “But um, mostly my thoughts. We stopped going when…when I started doing college tours on the weekends. So, uh.”

“Right,” Will says, taking it in stride. Busy weekends, doing all that murdering. “Catholic?”

“Lutheran.”

“Ah. No confession,” Will says.

Her laugh is a sharp exhale. “What about you? You ever have any sins to confess to?”

“Me? Nope,” Will says, with a wry and tilted smile. ( _You ever have any problems?)_ “Daddy didn’t believe in sin, or at least, original sin. He believed in guilt though, and it was a good way to act like a God-fearing man. In the end, church was just a place to get free food and free clothes.”

And occasionally, a chance for Beau to play on the church piano after services. Will had learned most of the basics that way. 

Abigail hums, contemplative again. “So you didn’t care much for God.”

“Nope. Daddy was always irreverent. You have to be, to be a lapsed Catholic, marrying a Jew in Louisiana, going to Baptist churches in the Bible Belt,” he says, the words slipping out without permission.

He’s so distracted by his admission that he doesn’t speed up enough by an on-ramp. Someone in another pickup, this one completely mud-splattered, lays the horn on them as they merge in behind Will and drive up too close to the back bumper. With tires squealing, they overtake him on the left. The portly pink man in the driver’s seat with a ragged beard flips Will off. 

For a brief moment, Will wants to follow him until he can take a knife to the man’s throat and watch him choke on his own blood. Maybe run him over with his own truck. Maybe drag and quarter him. 

“ _Where_ did these assholes learn to drive? Fuckin’ cocksuckers,” Will swears, his face hot. He remembers that he’s not alone and glances at Abigail in alarm. “Shit, I didn’t mean—”

Abigail just laughs, a little derisive, a little unimpressed, and a lot amused. “It’s fine. Hannibal never swears, it’s kind of a nice change.”

“Well, if he’d been a police officer, he’d have picked up a few curses,” Will says. “And just because he doesn’t swear in front of you doesn’t mean he doesn’t have it in him.”

“True,” she says. Then, after a beat, “You want to kill that guy?”

“Desperately,” Will breathes, and to his surprise, Abigail grins. “But let's not get ahead of ourselves.”

With a strangely determined expression, she switches the car stereo from the low drone of NPR to the CD still in there from the day before. 

“I read the lyrics in the booklet,” she says at Will’s questioning glance. She tracks to the last song on the album. “I want to hear it.”

Will can’t help his lip twitching in private amusement as Morrisey croons on.

_“Heifer whines could be human cries_

_Closer comes the screaming knife_

_This beautiful creature must die_

_This beautiful creature must die_

_A death for no reason_

_And death for no reason is murder”_

Abigail returns the smile, like a secret shared.

* * *

They pull into the outskirts of Knoxville, Tennessee just before the evening rush hour traffic starts. There’s a dog-friendly room available at a Days Inn in a sad, suburban sprawl strip mall, right across from the Waffle House and the BP gas station. Alone, he’d take a motel, but Abigail wanted a decent shower and a decent night of sleep. He’s seen enough crime scenes and been on enough Federal-budget trips with Jack to not want to subject her to the Jackson Pollock nightmare of motel bedspreads and public school water fountain pressure of motel showers. 

It’s too early for dinner, so Abigail insists on going shopping. Further into town, they stop at a bookstore where she buys a couple of paperbacks. He too is getting tired of playing I, Spy and trying to profile drivers based on their cars and bumper stickers. 

That leaves them Walmart for the essentials out of convenience, even though it’s one of the places he hates the most. They split up to look for underwear, and after getting a few more t-shirts, a pair of shorts, and then dog food for Winston, he wanders into the toiletries section. He’s fine with hotel shampoo and he’s good on deodorant, so he reluctantly grabs a razor. He certainly didn’t bring an electric one and if he grows out his beard, he will probably look like a serial killer. 

“You already are a killer, Will,” says Hannibal. 

Will whirls around, fumbling to hold onto the plastic package. It’s a hallucination because Hannibal doesn’t shop Walmart Supercenters in small towns in Tennessee. He’s wearing the black three-piece suit he wore the night of their last supper because _of course he is_. Will tries not to think about how Hannibal used to wear more plaid and more flamboyant colors. Or how Will used to wear more plaid. Nowadays Will just wants to dress in black head to toe because he doesn’t know if he’s grieving or if he’s the undertaker.

Whatever it is, he can’t carry it to Louisiana. Louisiana won’t have him like that. Too damn hot. 

“Yeah, but not a _serial_ killer,” Will retorts. “Two down one to go.”

Hannibal-in-his-head is grieving something too. Will can tell by the way the air around him, rather than his expression, shifts.

“I believed the best of you, Will,” he said. 

“You believed the best of _you,_ ” Will counters. He sighs, tilting his head back with his eyes closed. “And I…I did too. Hated myself for it. But I did.”

“Are you, like, done zoning out staring at 3-in-1 shampoo?” Abigail interrupts.

Will snaps back to his fluorescent drugstore reality. Hannibal’s gone. In his place, Abigail holds a basket with a huge box of tampons and pads, shampoo and conditioner (definitely the fancier kind), a pair of scissors, and some assortment of lotions and whatnot.

“Yeah,” Will rasps, then awkwardly clears his throat. _Just talking to Hannibal in my head, nothing to see here. Will Graham isn’t crazy. Well, not that kind of crazy._ “You need anything else?”

“Nope,” she says, popping the ‘p.’

When they’ve checked out (who in god’s name pays thirty bucks for shampoo alone, Will Graham does, _apparently)_ Will says, “You want me to cut your hair or are you going to hack it alone?”

“Can you cut hair?” 

He doesn’t, and he tells her this, but she just says something about watching a video online. Unfortunately, this spirals into a long argument in the car about how he still has a Blackberry of all things and how is he supposed to watch anything on the tiny screen and is it even connected to the internet? This just results in him shelling out a decent amount of cash on a new phone for her. Sleek and shiny, on her insistence, and a second flip-phone burner to complement it on Will’s insistence. 

“Seriously, don’t trust anything you can’t take the battery out of,” he says. 

They pick up cheeseburgers for dinner and go back to the Days Inn off the highway exit, Winston overjoyed to see them again.

Under the garish globe bulbs of the hotel bathroom, Will cuts Abigail’s long, dark hair to her chin. 

“You look so much older like that,” he says. 

She stares at her reflection in the mirror, then past herself in the mirror to Will. He thinks he did a damn good job, considering. 

“Before my dad cut my throat, it was like I was frozen in time. Trying to be his little girl, helping...helping him borrow time for me. When he was gone time started moving again. I didn’t have to think about him killing me when I picked out clothes. I didn’t have to look small or young.” 

She smooths her fingers through her shorn hair, moving her part off to the side so more hair covers her missing ear. 

“I think I got frozen again when he took my ear,” Abigail breathes. _He. Him._ Not _Hannibal._ In heavier moments, he’s their mutually unspoken monster. “I was free. And happy. And he saved me from Jack Crawford trying to hang me for my dad’s crimes.”

“You liked him. He took care of you. Protected you when I couldn’t.”

“Yeah,” she says. 

“Why did you leave?” Will says. 

“You can be free but still be standing still,” she replies. “Sometimes you want to say _fuck it_ and take something back when so much has been taken from you. When you don’t have any choices left.”

“I get that,” he says. After a beat, “You look nice. Bitchin’.”

She grins, points of pink on her cheeks.

After cleaning up long chunks of Abigail’s hair off the chipped tile and old laminate sink, they eat cheeseburgers sprawled out on the beds and mindlessly watch The Twilight Zone. Winston begs for french fries. 

In some other world, Hannibal is there with them.

_The alien, in communicating with Man is cast out from his home and doomed to death upon return. And Man, for knowing him, unleashes death and destruction upon the world. Tell me Will, am I the creature of electricity and hurricane, reaching out for the mortal man capable of reaching back? Will you doom me to death to spare the banal, close-minded world? Will you doom yourself to a life of maddening politeness, bearing the weight of your uniqueness alone?_

_Get out of my head, asshole,_ Will thinks as he eats his fries with vicious pleasure. 

At some point, he makes eye contact with Abigail. In that instant, they’re thinking about the same thing, the same person, at the same time and dissolve into stomach-clutching laughter at the absurdity of it all. 

“I keep trying to imagine him eating fries,” Abigail wheezes. 

“I know,” Will says. He laughs until his face hurts. “I know.”

He scratches Winston’s ears and hopes the dogs are okay. Wishes they were here with him.

* * *

Nights like these, where all the motel rooms he’s ever slept in blur into one, demons creep out from his mind and slip over his skin like silk shadows, like biting ants, like ice water. When he turns on the bed to face the center instead of the door, in some world, he’s looking at Hannibal. And Hannibal looks back. Will reaches across the thin, itchy comforter to brush back the silver-gold strands falling into his monster’s eyes. 

“I think about you,” Will tells him, “in every motel I’ve ever been in. They’re all the same. So I always think about that morning.”

“I remember it too. It leaves a dull ache now, to think of your laugh,” says his imago of Hannibal. “I miss you, Will.”

“Don’t say things like that to me. I know you just miss your broken toy,” Will whispers. 

“Is the vastness of what I feel for you so horrifying that you blind yourself to it even while I’m a figment of your mind?”

“If I’m wrong, Hannibal,” he says, pressing his eyes shut. “If I’m wrong about that, I won’t survive it.”

When Will opens his eyes again, Hannibal is gone and Will tries to tell himself he doesn’t feel abandoned, that he doesn’t feel hollowed out so cleanly the inner curvature of his ribs gleam. Abigail hasn’t moved in a while, her breathing deep and even. 

_Can you forgive him?_

He’s been pretending since he walked out of his cell that he’s okay, that all this is okay, that he’s got it handled. He’s walking around with a gut-wound, festering under a heavy bandage, and hiding the bloodied antlers piercing their way out of him. Will slips from his bed and stumbles on unbalanced legs to his duffel bag, clutching at the imagined blood pouring out of him. He fishes out the handle of whiskey and doesn’t bother with cups or anything. 

_I don’t need a sacrifice._

The unfailingly practical part of his painfully sober, tortured brain — the part that remembered to flush Randall’s face of Will’s DNA and wash the blood off his living room floor with bleach and dispose of the bone suit before Freddie could come crawling around — finds a flannel to pull over his sweat-damp t-shirt. 

_That’s the worst part. I think…I think I already did._

Will feels his way to the bathroom in the dark, whiskey clutched tight even as he sinks down into the tub. He drinks straight from the neck. Maybe enough cheap whiskey, searing his tongue like freshly lit kerosene, will burn the taste of the lamb out. Maybe if he’s pickled enough on the inside Hannibal won’t bother with killing and eating him. He takes long draughts of amber liquid and feels the inside of his head sloshing along with the bottle. 

_I would forgive you._

Well, he doesn’t fucking _deserve_ to be forgiven. Playing footsie with the devil doesn’t just go unpunished.

A good half-hour of measured sips later finds him properly drunk for the first time since his tragic hookup with Margot, which he still can’t quite regret because it had been nice to have someone’s hands on him and to have his hands on someone else without violence. She’d been single-minded about her own pleasure, showing him exactly how she liked it. Maybe it’s a lesbian thing. He wasn’t about to cause a fuss. Clear instructions make it easier to not have to guess. Easier to enjoy himself. But also easier for his mind to wander to…other things. To cross wires not meant to be crossed, like thinking about the muscle in Hannibal’s forearms and reattaching (or detaching) kidneys or surgeon’s hands and the very particular array of those palm calluses brushing Will’s neck. 

Will takes another few sips of whiskey. His face is numb. He can’t feel his ass, but he’s a little stiff between the legs from replaying that memory. (If he lies to himself and says it’s Margot, well, that’s his business, isn’t it?). It won’t last long anyways; another few sips and he’ll be well into whiskey dick territory.

He’s fucked up enough that the particulars of sexuality have never really been something to focus on, but if he feels for the edges of it, he doesn’t think he’s actually picky either way. He was a Southern boy of a blue-collar father in the 90’s. When girls started pursuing him, he didn’t have to think too hard about Tommy in Biloxi. About how his mouth tasted like goldfish and root beer and how he’d ended up in the river, bloated and dead in a trip line. _(An accident. He’d drowned. His parents were never right after that, not that the Grahams stuck around long after Daddy got a job up in Missouri.)_

His college experiences amounted to a few drunk or otherwise inebriated hookups when he stopped looking at bugs and textbooks long enough to actually go anywhere, though biochemistry study groups were, occasionally, fruitful. Something about curls and a deep dislike of interaction mistaken for shyness seemed to scream _prey, pursue_. Sometimes he still thinks about Shelly blowing him in the library, or being tangled up with Joanna for hours in bed in his shitty off-campus apartment paid by his meager work-study stipend and loans. Less often, he thinks about the handjob, high on ecstasy, he got at a party from some business major whose name he doesn’t remember. Will does remember the boy’s green eyes, that he’d been a swimmer, and that he was a middle child trying hard to prove himself.

Being on the police force, with its seething displays of masculinity and fraternity quickly re-molded him. He cut back his ringlets until his hair was just long enough to hide how much his ears stuck out. He still kept his face clean-shaven but not so smooth anymore. He learned to politely decline sex, firmly decline sex, and emphatically decline sex in English, Creole French, and Spanish well before he got promoted from beat duty. Just as quickly, he learned to be prickly enough that even if people thought he was pretty enough to be a rent boy, no one ever said it to his face.

_(The irony of all ironies is that Hannibal never looked at you like a piece of meat or a science experiment.)_

As far as relationships went, they were few and short-lived. Pretty face, surly exterior, shaky and sensitive. There were people less self-preserving than Alana who got trapped like that. This extended into graduate school, though the outer shell was less clean-cut, upstanding cop and more harrowed academic, glasses and all. He thinks he could have fallen in love with the girl with coke-bottle glasses who sometimes studied the carnivorous insect collection in the basement of the Natural History museum at the same time as him. He never learned her name and he thinks it’s for the best. He’s not charming. He’s not even very nice. 

No one cracked him open and no one really wanted to; no one until Hannibal. Hannibal, who’d scaled every wall with ease, who’d gentled Will like a skittish stray, who’d looked at the mess of Will Graham with convincing awe and then proceeded to commit gross medical malpractice and cook his brain, to shove an ear down his throat, and finally, to alienate (or kill) everyone with whom he’d had any sort of passing connection. And doesn’t that hurt? 

_(You were, in fact, meat and a science experiment.)_

Will wonders why Hannibal hasn’t made a meal of him yet. Maybe he’s just too practical to kill so close. Maybe he hasn’t decided what parts he’ll eat. His liver’s too pickled for consumption. His smoking habit from the police force probably won’t make his lungs any good for sausage. His kidneys after his Homicide diet of dirty rice, sardines, and cup noodles would be downright awful. His heart might be decent; he runs regularly. Brain might be poetic. Hannibal did always want to crack him open that way. 

Vaguely, through the whiskey haze, a part of him sounds a weak alarm about suicidal ideation, but the part of him that’s roaming drunk off his ass in the stream thinks about how it’s a little romantic to not be wasted. He thinks about a warm palm cradling his neck, just under the point of his jaw. He doesn’t remember if he caps the whiskey bottle or if he just falls asleep cradling it, letting the rest spill onto his clothes. He doesn’t remember passing out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Will and Abigail listen to Meat is Murder by The Smiths. 
> 
> Shastra Deo has a few poems written from the perspective of a young Will Graham and they're all amazing.
> 
> "After my mother leaves, my father  
> teaches me how to fish and gut and fillet,  
> to shuck oyster shells into the ocean  
> past the boatyards of Biloxi.
> 
> I never find a pearl, but sea salt  
> coats the sand and dirt and grit  
> sticking to my skin, the soles of my feet  
> dappled bright like black drum.
> 
> Some nights my father smokes mackerel  
> and ground mullet, the husks of old boat motors  
> strewn at our feet, while I watch the flounder fight  
> against the freshwater of the Singing River.
> 
> My mother once told me that man was not  
> meant to tame the sea, but my underbelly  
> is encrusted with red coral, and I have  
> circumvented shipwrecks beneath the bayou.
> 
> I haven’t been to church in seven years,  
> but with my fingers hooked in the gills  
> of a thrashing white trout,  
> I know that we unmake the fish  
> the same way God made him."
> 
> \- Mississippi Sound
> 
> So many thanks to everyone who's read, left kudos and commented! You are all so lovely.


	9. Abigail

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will calls up an old friend. Abigail thinks about werewolves.

9\. Abigail

* * *

_“Thus she's discovered the Conradian truth: The first horror is there's horror. The second is you accommodate it... You do what you do because it's that or death.”_

— Glen Duncan, _The Last Werewolf_

* * *

For a horrible moment after turning the bathroom lights on, she thinks Will’s dead and that she’ll have to take the car and Winston and run on her own.

“What the fuck!” Abigail says.

Will twitches in the bathtub at her shout, pale and clammy. He winces at the light. The tub reeks of whiskey and based on the empty bottle sitting on his soaked t-shirt and the flannel undone over it, he’d spilled whatever was left of it all over himself. At least he’s in sweatpants and not boxers because this is really the limit of shit she wants to experience this morning.

“Fuck,” he groans, eyes screwed shut. “Turn that fuckin’ light off.”

Winston noses his way into the bathroom, sniffing around for Will. She puts two fingers to his thready, weak pulse, but is satisfied to be able to find it at all. With how much he reeks of whiskey, she isn’t even sure he’s sober enough to be hungover yet. Hannibal would never end up like this, but he’d probably deal with his feelings by killing the source of his frustration.

“Well. I regret to inform you that you’re alive.”

“You tryin’ to get rid of me?” Will says, hoarse.

“I think you were trying to get rid of yourself,” she says.

He squints, red-eyed and shaking, at her. “Tub’s a good place for that.”

Something in the way he says it weighs on her. With her lips in a tight line, she gets the empty bottle out of the tub. When had he even bought a bottle of Hennessy?

“Do you do this a lot?” she asks, pressing her palm to his clammy forehead. His skin is pale as a corpse and just as translucent.

“No,” he mumbles. “Not as a habit, no.”

“What do you need?”

“To throw up,” he says, looking green.

“Uh, can you get to the toilet?”

“Trash can,” he says, and she grabs it just in time for him to puke into it.

“You’re so fucked up,” Abigail murmurs the whole time. Her hand soothes awkward circles on his back and he shivers at the touch like it hurts to be offered a kindness. “You’re so fucking fucked up.”

“Feel like someone disemboweled me,” he mutters. “Remind me…that I’m too fuckin’ old…to finish a handle of whiskey.”

“Drowning your sorrows isn’t the best strategy.”

“Oh really? Hannibal tell you that?” Will snaps, dry heaving a few more times before collapsing back with his cheek against cool tile. He closes his eyes and sighs like a dog settling in for a nap.

Abigail gingerly pries the trash bin out of his hands. She’s gutted deer and watched their entrails fall out — she can handle a bit of bile. “Common sense, I think.”

“Mm, what worked for Daddy works for Will Graham too,” Will drawls, a breathy laugh at the end.

She’s not quite sure if she should file that away as _alcoholic father,_ or _father used to binge drink,_ or, specifically, _father used to binge drink in the bathtub._ It’s a bizarre place to do something like that, surely. Her own father was a one-Pabst-Blue-Ribbon kind of man, and only when the Minnesota Vikings were playing.

“I’m going to bring you some clothes so you can shower,” Abigail says.

“Thanks,” he says, trying and only sort of succeeding at smiling at her.

She calls Winston out of the bathroom, then puts fresh clothes out on the bathroom vanity and waits cross-legged on the bed, watching cars pull into the gas station across the street until she hears the shower start.

In some other world, Will never shot her father in time and the cold steel of his knife bit too deep to stop the fountain of blood. In some other world, Hannibal wasn’t there, and she’s lying half-preserved, half-rotting with an open slash in her neck under some slab of granite. In some other world, she left the cliff house with Hannibal and she stepped into his open arms like a lamb climbing into the lap of a shepherd. In that world, she’s lying in a refrigerated mortuary drawer under a sheet, a y-shaped incision over her chest, the weights of all her organs carefully catalogued, trace evidence scraped off her skin.

Those worlds seem easier sometimes. When she sees Will spattered in blood with his gun pointed at her and hears the crack-crack-crack of a whole clip unloaded in her dreams. When he looks at her like he feels guilty for saving her and ending up in this whole mess. When he looks like he wants to turn the car around and go home, because despite all his denials, home is a person who isn’t with them.

_(You wanna be dead so bad? Call Hannibal, you taunt yourself. You drowned on blood once. Maybe this time you could do it right.)_

_Fuck that shit,_ Marissa reminds her. _You want to live._

Leaving the room, even with Winston trotting by her side, feels like leaving a fairy-tale world. She smiles at the people who glance at her in the hall and the elevator, but every look sends sparks of dread up her spine. Her hand seeks out Winston, who noses and licks at her clenching and unclenching fingers. Every stranger is Hannibal or Jack Crawford.

But no one stops her and says, “Oh, you’re the Hobbs girl! You’re supposed to be dead.” Only one person halts her walk to the concierge, and that’s a portly older woman who coos over Winston.

“He’s shy,” Abigail says, when Winston pins his ears and tucks his tail at the stranger.

No one asks her, _did you know you were eating them? Did you hold the butcher’s knife? Did you pick them?_ So she keeps walking, grateful that people are so enamored by the sight of a beautiful dog that she might as well not exist.

Karla at the concierge could have been one of the girls her dad sacrificed, if her dark hair wasn’t so severely pulled back into a bun and if she weren’t wearing a tight, angular pantsuit. There isn’t a single flyaway on Karla’s head. Her lipstick makes her mouth look like a bloodstain.

_(Guilt sloshes out of you, and even with your huntress’ soft-footed walk, you leave bloodstains everywhere you go. You can’t help it, you say. The cup’s brimming over.)_

“Do you know where I could, uh, buy some Advil or something?” Abigail asks. She nervously smooths her short hair over her missing ear, marveling at the new weight and length. _Bitchin’,_ Will said. Maybe she can get used to being around people again.

“Yeah, we keep some behind the counter,” she smiles, false and bright.

It’s 9 am, and from how she shifts in her shoes on the orthotic mat behind the counter, she’s been here for hours already, counting down the rest until she can go home to a glass of boxed wine and watch some mindless TV drama. At least Karla doesn’t give her the creeps like reedy, blonde, wispy-mustache Paul who checked them in yesterday.

Abigail pulls a few bills out of Will’s wallet in exchange for a bottle of chalky red pills, and says, “Thanks.”

After dipping outside the Days Inn to let Winston go to the bathroom, she goes back to their ground-floor room. Will’s still in the bathroom, but the shower isn’t running anymore. When he finally emerges, he’s fully dressed, slightly less green, and his face is shaved.

She does a double-take.

“God, you look so different,” she says, handing him water and a few Advil.

“Good or bad?”

“Better than that five-day beard for sure,” she says. The bruise-blue bags under his eyes and pallor give away that he slept in the fucking bathtub like a weirdo.

_(You wonder if Hannibal would still get that glazed look talking about Will if he knew. You think he would.)_

“When was the last time you were clean shaven?”

“Uh, when I gave my dissertation, I think,” Will says. He knocks back the pills and drowns the whole glass of water. “Thanks. And sorry for…you know”

She shrugs. “Gross. Don’t do it again.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he snorts.

“I looked it up. The paper you wrote. It’s behind a paywall,” she says.

“Fuckers,” Will chuckles.

While Will answers emails on his Blackberry with a water bottle on the table and a trash can between his feet, she takes a shower. Hannibal spoiled her when she lived at the cliff house with expensive shampoos and conditioners that were supposed to make her hair impossibly glossy and all kinds of creams and toners for her skin. For now, she’s settled for the best Walmart can offer.

 _‘Change of plans,’_ he’d said on the phone the night before she ran. ‘ _I’ll pick you up tomorrow afternoon to come to Baltimore. We will leave from my home.’_

 _‘Why?’_ she’d asked.

 _‘We have some circumstances of Will’s to accommodate,’_ he’d said, and though he’d sounded sure and even, an icy stab of dread pierced her, starting in her throat where her larynx had been scarred and dripping down to pool in her stomach.

 _I need to know I can trust you,_ he’d said in another life. But what if they couldn’t trust him?

It didn’t sit right with her that Hannibal kept her existence from Will. It didn’t sit right how he skirted past Will’s illness when she’d seen how sick Will was and she _knew_ Hannibal, of all people, could tell he was sick too. When she’d given her ear, she didn’t agree to have it shoved down into Will’s stomach. She didn’t agree to help frame him for her murder.

The occasional slips of _he mourns you_ and _he will be very happy to see you again_ from Hannibal didn’t make her feel any better about any of it. She isn’t about to forget how furious Will was in Minnesota. Furious at her for not being the innocent girl he could care for, but even more furious at Hannibal keeping secrets from Will. Obfuscations on top of lies on top of betrayals. It all makes her head spin.

The whole thing felt like a quiet disaster, and she wanted so badly to believe she did the right thing in her deal with the devil. She wanted him to be the man who saved her life and not the man on the phone. For Will to be the guy who killed her dad and not a good, solid half of the reason she’s still alive and has functional vocal cords.

_(You went to him because you suspected he messed up the plans. Because you were clawing heaving sheets of brash ice lies, slipping into freezing water. You wanted to take Will with you underwater, but he put out his hand to pull you into a boat instead.)_

She lets the conditioner run out of her hair, washes herself, and steps out to towel herself dry. It’s a small luxury to put on clean underwear and socks, to put on a t-shirt that is hers and not Will’s, and to put on her clothes, which comprise a pair black jeans and a gray sweater. In the mirror, her newly shorn hair still shocks her. It’s heavy and light at once. The blunt ends cling to the scar tissue on her neck. Her shoulders feel over-exposed. Is this what moving on feels like? Is this how she leaves her dad behind — by letting Will cut off the last symbol of her suspended, fairy-tale girlhood?

_(You can’t say that you know. You keep moving because when your dad asked you to please hold still, he cut your throat. You don’t think you’re okay. You don’t know where you are or what you’re doing.)_

Dutifully, she ties her scarf back around her neck, and tries not to think about how all the clothes Hannibal bought her left her throat wide open. Or how she’d picked out those clothes herself.

Will’s still at the little table in the corner when she comes out, absently scratching Winston’s ears, but now he’s on the phone, a persistent crease between his eyebrows.

“Yeah, he was my partner from ‘03 to ‘05. Major crimes,” he says, chewing his lower lip. There’s a pause.“Retired? What? Oh, he went private. He leave a number?”

Will scribbles something on a piece of paper ripped off the hotel notepad. She thinks its weird he didn’t rip it off after, but Will does a lot of weird things.

“Okay, thanks Thibaut. I appreciate it,” he says, his syllables drawing out a hair more than usual. Another pause. “Yeah, take care.” Will laughs. “Just be glad Mardi Gras is over.”

He hangs up a moment later, then gives her a one-sided smile.

“Thanks for the Advil,” he says. “I gotta make one more call. Can you start packin’?”

She nods, and keeps her good ear trained on him while she busies herself with refolding her clothes.

“Mikey?” Will says. “It’s Will Graham.”

“ _Shit, man,”_ she hears on the other line, then the rest dissolves into noise too low to hear. Either Mikey lowered his voice or Will turned the volume down on his phone.

She files the information away. _Mikey. Light Spanish accent. Partner from ‘03-‘05. Major crimes, likely in New Orleans. Retired now, private security?_

“You still around New Orleans?” Will asks, and sighs in relief at whatever answer Mikey gives him. “I’ll be in town, probably tonight. We should chat.”

Mikey says something that makes a frown flicker over Will’s face.

“I can’t do that, I got someone with me—” He drums his fingers on the tabletop. “Are you sure? You don’t even know what I want to talk to you about.” He stands up and starts pacing in front of the window, one hand shoved into his pocket. “I need...a contact. For papers.”

There’s an obvious silence on the other end of the line. Then a murmur.

“No, not for me,” he says, letting out a quick, breathy laugh. “At least not yet. Never know. You got an address for me?”

Will sits back down to scribble Mikey’s address down under his phone number.

“Thanks, Mikey. I owe you one,” Will says. Whatever Mikey says makes Will rub his thigh absently. “No, you don’t owe me for that—”

Abigail folds up her worn clothes, every atom burning with curiosity. She wonders if they can do laundry at Mikey’s place and how much he’ll talk about Will. Another part of her wonders what happens if he recognizes her.

“Thanks. We could probably make it tonight, if we hit the road now,” Will says. “Okay. See you then.”

Will hangs up and exhales, his cheeks puffing from the force of it. He rubs his now-smooth jaw, frowning.

“Where are we headed?” she asks.

“Covington, Louisiana,” Will says.

“To see Mikey, your old partner? We’re staying with him?”

Will nods. “Yeah. He’s got a guy that can get you papers.”

“But he’s a cop, right? Isn’t that...”

Will snorts. “Mikey’s better than the bunch. Heart of gold. But he isn’t squeaky clean.”

“Were you?” Abigail asks archly.

Will just grins at her. He looks, for a moment, terrifyingly wolfish. Like there should be blood all over his teeth. He tucks the note away in the chest pocket of his red checked shirt, then buttons the shirt up over his white t-shirt.As he folds his whiskey-stained clothes with Boy Scout fastidiousness, he says, “You need a new name. And to choose what we are to each other going forward.”

Abigail nods jerkily, having turned over the second thing in her head every night and drawn a blank for the first thing.

He drums his fingers against his thigh, ducking his head to avoid her eyes. “I’m old enough to be your father. I could also be your brother, cousin, whatever. Even weird murder step-uncle is on the table.”

She laughs at that; a quick bark that sends Winston trotting over to her to nose at her leg. She sits down on the bed next to her packed bag and beckons Winston up to pet him.

“You’re my dad, but I don’t call you dad. You didn’t know me most of my life,” she says, burying her head in the ruff of Winston’s neck. “It can be kind of like Gilmore Girls.”

At Will’s silence, she glances up to find him frowning in confusion.

“Are you serious?” Abigail says. “You’ve never seen Gilmore Girls?”

“Is that a movie?” he asks, lost.

“Oh my god. Have you ever had a TV?”

“Maybe a decade ago?” Will says. He cleans his glasses on a corner of his shirt, tucks the shirt into his pants, and puts the glasses back on. The overall effect, with his shaved jaw, must be what he looked like when he gave his dissertation.

“We’re getting something I can watch movies on,” says Abigail.

“Yes ma’am,” Will says, with a little hint of his long-buried Southern drawl.

“So you’re my real dad, but we don’t have that kind of relationship. We’re like friends, because I was raised by someone else. When they both died, you took me in.”

“It’s almost the truth,” he says, huffing a laugh.

Abigail drags him to breakfast around 11 am. Any stragglers eating keep their eyes mostly on Winston and ignore Will’s gray, haggard face under his baseball cap. Abigail forces him to eat whole-wheat toast.

They don’t talk about Will losing his shit. Another one for the _things we don’t speak about_ fortress, alongside how he feels about Hannibal, what happened to his parents, anything to do with Abigail’s father, and how much he likes killing people. Another topic saved for when she needs a tender spot to slide her knife in.

“This is familiar to you,” Abigail tells him over bland eggs and bitter, weak coffee at the motel. “You grew up like this, with your dad.”

“Washed up old man dragging around his overly perceptive kid?” Will chuckles darkly. “Yeah, that’s familiar.”

“I spent my whole life in one house,” she says.

He drinks down more bitter complimentary coffee, grimacing. “Only constant in my life is water.”

She eats a dry lemon and poppy seed muffin, crumbly and artificial, wondering if Will’s the current knocking the back of her knees, or if he’s the one standing still being slowly eroded.

_(Are you the lure again? Floating through the air in a perfect serpentine arc to land lightly on the rippling surface. Colorful, feathered mimicry hiding a hook. You’d like to be the fisherman. Despite it all, all the crossed wires of fatherhood and blood and your determination to use a pair of waders to ingratiate yourself with a Will you still don’t know and can’t predict, you liked being the fisherman.)_

After their late breakfast, they pack up the car. Winston curls up on his blanket in the back seat after Will takes him for a short walk around the hotel, citing his own need for fresh air and not wanting Winston to forget him for Abigail.

“We gotta get you a license soon” says Will, groaning as he buckles his seatbelt and starts the car.

“Like you’d let me drive your precious car?” she retorts.

“When I feel like roadkill, yes. We can get you your own car, by the way. When we get down somewhere more permanent,” he says.

She hopes they live long enough for that to happen. She knows he’s thinking the same thing.

“A pickup,” she declares. “And I want you to teach me to drive stick.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he grins.

They drive and drive and drive. The endless two-lane freeway and the low purr of Will’s Volvo never fails to lull her into a state of half-alertness, half-dreaming. All the trees look the same. All the rest stops. All the crumbling strip malls and aging signs for Dollar General or vacuum repairs. They pass abandoned parking lots slowly growing over with grass in their cracked surfaces.

Two hours into the drive, they fill up for gas. Will buys a pack of cigarettes and tells her that she’s absolutely not allowed to ask him any questions about it or dole out judgment. They pull into the next rest stop a few minutes later.

“I’m going to walk Winston,” she says, desperate for some air. Will nods.

He isn’t used to being cooped up with someone. She isn’t either. She’s been alone for half a year now. More, if she counts the time at Port Haven as alone. Part of her wants to take off for the empty brown field behind the rest stop and go and go and go until she can’t anymore.

Across the parking lot, Will, leaning against the hood of the Volvo, smokes a cigarette under a chilly, slightly hazy sun. The need for a bit of breathing room is fine. It’s honest. She knows where she stands with him, and he’s not afraid to tell her he’s sick to death of being interrogated by her. But as she watches him smoke, she wonders if it’s not just the choking proximity with her or whatever ties him to Hannibal ripping under the strain of leaving. Maybe it’s something about going South.

She gets back in the car, Winston in his own seat. Whatever it is makes his fingers tremble lighting his second cigarette, but damn if he isn’t going to see this barely-made decision through. Even if he looks like he’s about to fall apart in the process. That’s the sort of Will Graham thinking that brought her back to Minnesota, after all.

When he’s done, only marginally more relaxed, Will crawls back into the car, reeking of Marlboro Reds.

“Can we listen to something that isn’t The Smiths or NPR?” Abigail asks him.

“You can tune the radio,” he says, starting the car again. “They have nothing but country and classic rock out here though.”

They get back on the highway. She fiddles with the radio tuner and car eats up miles and miles of faded asphalt. Dashed lines vanish as fast as they come as Will drives on and on, always exactly five miles over the speed limit.

_“So if you meet me_

_Have some courtesy”_

“What was your dad’s name?” Abigail asks, turning down the volume on the classic rock station.

_“Have some sympathy, and some taste”_

“Beau,” Will says, eyes firmly fixed on the road. “Beau William Graham.”

_“Use all your well-learned politesse_

_Or I'll lay your soul to waste, mm yeah.”_

“Named after your dad. What’s _your_ middle name? Starts with S.”

Will gives her a sharp look. “Have you been rooting around in my wallet?”

She just shrugs. “A Justice Federal Credit Union debit card, an M&T bank credit card, a Bass Pro Shops rewards card, an expired Banana Republic gift card, your Quantico ID badge, Virginia driver’s license. William S. Graham, birthday November 21, 1979, brown hair, blue eyes, height 5’10’, weight —”

“Sassoon,” he interrupts.

“What?”

“My middle name.”

“That’s not a name,” Abigail says.

The glare Will shoots her freezes her insides. She’s trespassed some sort of cannon-armed fortress of Will’s mind. _Things we never speak about._ Amazing how he can go from looking like a sad, kicked dog to _shit-your-pants-scary_ , as Marissa would say. The cold look in his eyes has her momentarily weighing the options of survival if she stabs him through the eye while he’s driving versus just rolling out of a car going over 60 miles per hour. She’s leaning towards stabbing.

As if he can sense that train of thought, he smiles. It’s not a nice smile. It’s a Hannibal-smile, where only the corners of his mouth move but his eyes stay frozen.

“It was my mother’s name,” Will admits, as if she’s pulling it out of him with pliers. “It’s a bit of a Southern tradition, to give your child their mother’s maiden name.”

Shame flushes her cheeks. “Oh.”

“She’s a…sore topic,” Will says.

“What was her name?”

“Why are you so interested?” Will asks. “You still need to pick a new one for yourself.”

“I looked up my name once. Did you know it means _father’s joy_?” she says with a cold, mirthless laugh, sidestepping his reminder. “Good joke, right. And ah, Abigail Hobbs was a teenage girl accused of being a witch at the Salem Witch Trials in the 1600s. She admitted to covenanting with the devil.”

Will worries his lower lip between his teeth, but his eyes are soft again.

“Rebecca,” Will says. It comes out raspy and choked, like he’s never said her name aloud to another living soul. “I never knew her.”

“Rebecca Sassoon,” Abigail says.

For a moment, Will glances sharply over his left shoulder, as if looking for a car in his blind spot. There’s none, of course. Just a flash of his lower lip trembling. It’s gone when he focuses back on the endless road ahead.

* * *

A few hours later, they eat a late lunch of two cheap, greasy pepperoni pizza slices in the car somewhere outside Birmingham, Alabama.

“Ok, you might have a point about ranch on pizza,” Will says.

She waves her slice in his face. “I _told_ you.”

“It’s just so fuckin’ Midwest,” he says, shaking his head at her.

“I didn’t get to have it often. Dad was all about home-cooked everything. My mom even canned things herself.”

“Special occasions?” he asks.

She shrugs. “Marissa’s birthday parties, mostly.”

“What about yours?”

“My dad took us on camping trips,” she says. “Like the Kirtland’s Warblers. Marissa was my only real friend. I didn’t— people didn’t —”

She sets her half-eaten slice down, her chest tight with things she’s tried so hard to forget. She was the strange girl in school who never looked at boys or went to school dances with them. Who spent too much time with her dad, and wasn’t that creepy? Wasn’t there something going on there? Why was she so nice and so pretty but didn’t have any real friends?

When she looks back up, Will has an odd expression on his face.

“Yeah,” he says softly, like she said everything she couldn’t say out loud. “I always thought that would be the worst time in my life.” _Not anymore,_ remains firmly unsaid.

“Ringing endorsement of the future,” Abigail quips.

“Yeah, well, I think if you don’t contract encephalitis or get framed for murder by your psychiatrist and one of the most prolific serial killers of the last century, you’re good to go in terms of future.”

She considers this. “Well, that’s assuming he doesn’t slit my throat when he finds me.”

“God. None of that,” he scolds her. “Over my fuckin’ dead body. Besides, aren’t you a goddamn 50-yard shooting champion? I saw your trophies in evidence.”

“I don’t exactly have a Remington on me,” she says.

“Not exactly hard to buy a gun in Louisiana,” he retorts. “And there’s a handgun in the back seat.”

She slides her eyes back up to his face. “Noted.”

They finish their pizzas and take the trash out to a bin in the parking lot. Will has her put the route into her new phone.

“We’ll be in Covington in about four hours,” he says, buckling up. “You thought of a name yet?”

She can’t bear to look him in the eyes.

“The only name I can think of now is Rebecca,” she whispers.

Beside her, Will exhales, long and shaky. “The only memory of her I have is her funeral. I was six.”

She thinks about the red smear on her front porch where her own mom died. About the stain that painted her kitchen floor. About how the crime scene cleaners scrubbed it all away only for her to paint it again with her blood. About the way she keeps offering herself to a knife. Somewhere in the back of her mind she knows that’s trauma: reaching back always for something that isn’t there because harm’s the only thing that feels true and safe.

Except for the bloodstain, her mom’s memory is untainted. Abigail would like to keep in that way.

“I miss my mom,” she admits.

He’s quiet for a few contemplative beats before saying, “You don’t have to give everything up, you know. You could keep your middle name.”

Her heart batters her ribs, a bird leaping.

“Louise,” she whispers. “My…my mom’s name.”

Will starts the car and gets back on the road. They’re cutting close to rush-hour Monday traffic, so the road is more crowded than it’s been before. Will’s face twitches with restrained frustration at the traffic.

“You’d be Joanna’s daughter based on timing,” Will muses as they merge onto the freeway. “Rebecca Louise Carter?”

“I like the sound of that, but I _really_ don’t want to think about you knocking anyone up,” Abigail says, wrinkling her nose.

“God, me neither. Ended badly last time,” Will says, rubbing his forehead.

“What!”

“You said you didn’t want to think about it,” Will reminds her.

“Well, now I kind of want to know. How long ago was it?”

“Oh, god. A few weeks ago?” Will says.

She stares at him in shock. “Weeks! Will Graham!”

The sheer absurdity bubbles up in him as a strained laugh.

“It gets worse,” he says.

“Of course it does,” says Abigail.

“She was Hannibal’s patient,” he says. “And she was trying to have an heir. A male heir.”

“Heir? That sounds like some rich people shit,” says Abigail.

“Definitely rich people shit,” Will scoffs.

“Why a male heir?” She says.

“Something about her father’s will being really specific. The money goes to a male heir, and if there isn’t one, it all goes to the Southern Baptist Church.”

“She wanted a kid so she’d have an inheritance? Wait, how did you agree to that?” Abigail says. Will just gives her a long, flat look that says, _I sure as hell didn’t agree to it,_ and oh, that’s awkward and weird and not something she really wants to think about. She did ask though. She really did.

“We were commiserating Hannibal’s therapy over arguably too much whiskey. She...had an agenda, which I was unaware of. Not that I complained too much,” Will says, his ears turning red.

“But it didn’t work out? She lost it?” she asks.

“Yeah,” Will says, avoiding her eyes.

“Why didn’t she just go to a…sperm bank? Or like, a bar?”

“Her previous murder attempt ruled out…official channels. And she’s…not exactly interested in men.”

Abigail stares at him. Murder attempt. Well, it makes sense that she was in therapy with Hannibal. The second part has the cogs of her brain screeching to a halt.

“You...slept with a _lesbian_ and...you...knocked her up.” Abigail’s voice is flat, somewhere between horrified and full of dark amusement at his expense. Will makes a funny little expression that says, _yup, guess I did. My life is a nightmare._ “Huh,” she scoffs. “Well, in that case I’m not surprised she picked you.”

“Why is that?”

“Flannel, Volvo, fifty dogs, whiskey,” Abigail counters with a raised brow. “You’re practically butch.”

Will laughs.

“Seven dogs. Well,” he corrects, a bit mournful. He looks over his shoulder to Winston. “One now.”

The rush hour traffic thins around 6 pm. The road stretches out ahead, flat and uninteresting. Ever since they’ve left the Appalachian mountains, everything looks the same as everything else. It could be Minnesota for all she knows. A billboard advertises ‘Frontier Bingo’ outside Tuscaloosa, and right after it, deep wheel marks gouges the grassy berm. Scrap metal scatters for what must be hundreds of feet along the shoulder. Life’s funny like that. One day you’re living your life and the next you’re flattened on the side of the highway. Or you’re eating sausage and eggs and a strange man calls asking to talk to your father.

_(Everyone says you never see disaster coming, but they’re lying. You always see it coming, but like a deer crossing a road, you just hope that it’s not this time.)_

While there’s still light out, she cracks open the novel she’s been reading in the evenings instead of losing herself in her head. When the sun slips beneath the horizon, Will turns the overhead light on for her, even though her dad used to chide her for doing that as a kid, saying he couldn’t see out the rear view mirror.

 _And there in the espresso-dark eyes was the accommodation, the submission to experience she’d made in the silence of her heart, astonished at herself, once she’d decided to accept what she was, once she’d decided to kill others instead of herself,_ she reads. _She suffered fiery hunger and did vile deeds now, had begun teaching herself enlarging self-forgiveness. You do what you do because it’s that or death._

“The first horror is there’s horror,” says Abigail, her fingers tracing the page of her book. “The second is you accommodate it.”

“That from your book?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s it about?”

She smiles. “Werewolves.”

Will’s eyes dart over her before turning back to the road. Then his brow furrows, his mouth turning into something closed and reflective.

“Have you...” he starts, making a very Hannibal-like twitch with the muscles under his eyes, “have you accommodated it?”

“I think so,” she says, thinking about how she dug up Nick Boyle’s body. About all the dead-eyed girls with bloodstained nightgowns in her nightmares. How she’s guilty but she doesn’t know what that really means for her. _You do what you do because it’s that or death._ “You?”

“I...no. Yes. I don’t know.”

Leaving a dog-ear where she left off, she closes her book. She flicks off the overhead light. Darkness, punctured by the lazy sweep of headlights along the trees and red taillights, washes over them. It feels like the night they left Wolf Trap. Hazy, like a dream.

“But you’re in the process of accommodating it,” she murmurs. “It doesn’t sit right. It hurts. It’s ugly for other people to see. But you’re making space for it anyways because it’s going to grow with or without you.” More confident, she presses on. “At least, when you make a conscious choice, when you open that door and you don’t know what’s coming through, you can control _when._ ”

He sighs. “Sometimes you open the door, and you aren’t ready walk through. You aren’t even ready to look. So you lock it away.”

“Is that what you did?” she asks.

He takes a steadying breath.

“About nine years ago, I was working a case in New Orleans as a homicide detective,” Will says.

Abigail narrows her eyes. “I really can’t imagine you as a cop, you know. You hate authority.”

“Youngest to be promoted to detective in the NOPD,” he says with a harsh laugh. “Good at reading people and reading evidence.”

“Did you get lots of serial killers?”

“No, despite what working at the BAU makes you think, serial murder is pretty rare. Domestics, shoot-outs, robberies gone bad, muggings gone bad, kidnapping and trafficking. Only had one serial killer, and they never knew he was a serial killer until I caught him.”

“How did you catch him?” Abigail asks.

Will chews on his lower lip, scanning the road ahead. He sighs.

“It was supposed to be a routine interview of a victim’s ex-husband. Something about it felt serial, but we didn’t have bodies to connect yet, just a hunch I told my Sergeant. I saw a man watching in a house down the street and I told my partner I was going to check something out while he took a statement. The guy was gone. I tracked him down to a boat shed he had on the intercostal waterway and only managed to call my partner when he got me.”

His fingers drum absently on the gearshift, jaw working with tension.

“I still remember how he smelled,” Will says, voice barely above the hum of the engine. “Like sour beer and sweat. Like old blood. He had me pinned with a knife in my shoulder and I had my gun in his belly with my finger holding a pound of trigger pressure. I saw all of it. I saw him die and I saw myself covered in his blood. I saw the thrill of killing him. The righteousness. The quiet power over life and death. I saw the poison in me already, waiting for a catalyst.”

“You turned your face away. You didn’t pull the trigger.”

Will huffs. “Nothing so…deliberate. I saw a shadow creeping at the corners of my eyes. I just...didn’t look.”

“So he stabbed you, but you got away?”

“Yep,” Will says. “My partner got him in the chest — right lung, survivable. He got locked up. They only found the knives later. DNA matching a bunch of bodies washed up. I quit the force citing workplace injury, took my check from the union and went to grad school so that I could get a job a bit further from temptation. Lucky that they didn’t let me be an agent, lucky they let me in the lab and when they noticed the work I was doing, I let myself be chained to a teaching post.”

“Muzzled yourself,” she says.

“It’s better than letting myself bite,” he says. “Most rabid dogs get put down.”

But wild animals bite, and no one blames them for their nature. And who can blame a wild thing for closing their jaws around the hand yanking the leash? She’d seen the long scars along the inside of Hannibal’s wrists and when she’d asked about them, he’d said they were a gift from Will.

She frowns. “You bit. You had that man go after Hannibal.”

“I did,” he says.

“Do you wish he’d succeeded?” she asks.

Her voice sounds small. She’s not quite sure what would have happened to her if Hannibal was gone. Going back into the world would have brought her right back into Jack Crawford’s jaws and it wouldn’t have freed Will, not when he’d committed murder by proxy. She would have missed Hannibal and his weekly visits up to the cliff house. The cooking lessons, the pianoforte, the clothes. The attention and the care. He was making her into something, cleaving and carving bits away, but she would have missed him. Does miss him.

_(You keep baring your throat to the knife because it always comes from a hand that cares about you.)_

“The day after I got out of prison, I broke into his house. I put a gun to his head,” he says, cold and detached.

She tenses in her seat. Just how much happened without her knowing about it?

“Why didn’t you kill him?”

“I don’t think I was trying to,” he muses. “I thought — suspected — he let me out because he…fuckin’ _missed_ our little game. Wanted to be friends. I wanted to see how far he’d go.”

“You were curious what would happen,” she says.

Will nods once. “He...he surrendered. Spun some nice words about what the Ripper wanted with me and didn’t I want to know, to understand? He was so damn pleased to see me. And so damn reckless.”

“He was vulnerable,” she says. “You got under his armor. And you realized you could tear it off, like he did to you.”

“Something like that,” Will says.

“Did you...” She worries her lower lip between her teeth. “Do you ever think he didn’t actually want you to be vulnerable? That he never wanted to cage you? That it...it wasn’t a game for him, not all of it? Just like it started out a game for you but you couldn’t keep playing it, not really.”

Will doesn’t reply.

* * *

They pull up to a white-sided shotgun-style house around 8:30 pm. It would look like a gingerbread house if not for the creeping green mildew or peeling paint on the porch railing. A man, mid-thirties, with a close-cropped military haircut and a clean-shaven face stands under the porch light, arms crossed.

Will drums his fingers absently on the steering wheel. He takes a steading breath, eyes fluttering closed, and when they open again, dark and glittering in the porch light, something has shifted behind them.

“Let me talk to Mikey first,” he says. Even his voice is softer, more drawling. He throws her a reassuring smile before unfolding out of the car with a sort of lean, lupine grace so different from the twitchy, haunted man she’s spent the last couple days with.

“Mikey,” Will says, ducking his head in greeting.

Mikey’s tan face splits into a brilliant, blinding white smile. He has deep dimples in his cheeks. “Willy, my man!”

He pulls Will forward into a back-slapping hug. Abigail’s never understood why men do that, and Will, from the awkward set of his shoulders, finds the motion just as bizarre.

“The girls around?” Will asks when Mikey’s released him.

Mikey looks sheepish. “Ah, no. The girls are with their mama. We divorced.”

“Shit, sorry,” Will says.

“It’s alright. They visit often. So, who you got there?” he asks, gesturing his chin to the car.

Abigail tentatively steps out of the car and waves. Mikey’s gaze is critical and searching.

“This is Rebecca,” says Will, waving Abigail over. “She’s mine.”

Abigail creeps forward, sheepish.

“Nice to meet you, sir,” she says, holding her hand out. Mikey shakes it firmly.

“No way, Graham,” Mikey laughs at Will. “Who knew you had it in you?” He turns back to Abigail. “I’m Michaelangelo Sanchez, but everyone calls me Mikey.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Sanchez,” she says.

He grins, shaking his head. “Mr. Sanchez, ha. Lets get y’all inside.”

They grab their overnight bags and Winston from the car. Winston sniffs at Mikey’s hand but stays glued to Abigail’s side.

Mikey’s house is somewhere between a bachelor pad with its giant flat-screen and lumpy leather recliner and matching sofa from a bargain furniture catalog, and a family home, with its photographs and collection of kids books on a shelf. She catches _Black Beauty_ and _A Little Princess._ Mikey tells them he doesn’t have a guest room to set them up in and brings out a bunch of pillows and blankets into the living room. Will offers to take the floor while giving Abigail the sofa for the night.

“Hungry?” Mikey asks.

“If you’re offering, we won’t say no,” Will replies.

“Then I’m offering,” he says. “Beer for you?”

“Sure,” Will says, and follows Mikey to the kitchen.

Mikey cracks open a beer for him and Will in the kitchen while Abigail lays her book out on the coffee table and plugs in her phone to charge. She used to check TattleCrime regularly, but Freddie Lounds being dead has really put a damper on relevant or interesting news. Beside the lamp on the side table, there’s a picture of Mikey with what must be his ex-wife and two girls, around ten or twelve. They’re wearing matching pink dresses.

“We’ll need a picture,” she hears Mikey murmur. “Shouldn’t be too hard to get you a license, passport, social.”

“Thanks,” Will says.

“You know where you’re staying yet?” says Mikey.

“Not really,” Will replies. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees him take a sip of his beer. He catches her eye over the titled bottle and one corner of his mouth twitches. “I was going to check docks and stuff to see if I can get a job fixing boats up.”

She hears the tell-tale clang of pots and pans and gas stove clicking on.

“Good plan,” he says. There’s something measured in Mikey’s voice, like he’s considering telling Will something. But he doesn’t. He just says, “We can take pictures while the soup heats up.”

Will beckons her to stand in front of a blank wall in the hallway with the garish overhead light on and Mikey snaps a few photos of her. She doesn’t recognize Abigail Hobbs in any of them and an unspeakable feeling washes over her as she points out the one she likes best. How do you mourn yourself? When did she die? When did she start grieving? Is it time to start grieving? Does she exist anymore? _The first horror is there’s horror. The second is you accommodate it._

“Abigail,” Will says softly, jolting her out of her one-way train of thought straight to disaster with a hand on her elbow. Blinking, she notices Mikey’s not in the hall anymore.

“Sorry,” she says.

“You still exist,” he says, giving her arm a soft, grounding squeeze. “Your name is Abigail Hobbs—” He glances at his watch— “It’s 9:03 pm. You’re in Covington, Louisiana.”

Abigail takes a deep, steadying breath before letting it out slowly. _I exist. My name is Abigail Hobbs._ She lets Will corral her into the kitchen to take a stool next to Will at the tiled island.

“ _Sopa de caracol_ ,” Mikey announces, setting bowls out in front of them. Coconut, ginger, and cilantro steam up from her bowl, along with the tang of spice.

“Crab and crawfish?” Will asks, and Mikey hums in assent. “I hope you know I’ve been up north too long, we might need some milk.”

Mikey laughs. “It’s mild, Rosa gets hives.”

“That’s too bad,” Will says. He blows on his spoon for a second before digging in. He closes his eyes and lets out a soft sigh of pleasure. “Shit, that’s good. There’s decent Ecuadoran in Silver Spring, but I haven’t had Honduran in _ages._ ”

Encouraged, Abigail follows suit. She expects it to taste like it smells, tangy and sweet with the herby soapiness of cilantro. It’s fucking _hot._

“Goddamn,” Abigail swears, her face burning. She coughs.

Will’s lip twitches. “Oh fuck. Get her some milk or horchata, Mikey. And, ah, tabasco for me, while you’re at it.”

If she didn’t think Will was batshit crazy before, she certainly does now as dumps tabasco over the same soup that has her gulping down sweet horchata between spoonfuls.

Despite the whole-mouth burn she’s got going on, dinner is the best she’s had since she left Hannibal’s cliffside house. The crab and crawfish melt in her mouth, sweet and buttery against the tart bite of lime. It leaves her warm and full and flushed in the cheeks, grinning as she thanks Mikey for the dinner.

“Do you like cooking?” he asks her.

“I do,” she replies.

“I can give you the recipe,” he says. “It’s my grandma’s.”

“You never offered it to me,” Will complains.

Mikey grins. “You aren’t as nice.”

Will ducks his head, shrugging as if to say, _yep, that’s fair._ Abigail finds her cheeks cramping from how pleased the whole thing makes her.

“You don’t happen to have laundry, do you?” Will asks, setting his spoon down in the bowl, finally done. It’s the first thing she’s seen him savor since they’ve been together.

“No, but there’s a 24-hour laundromat downtown,” Mikey replies. “Maria’s”

Will nods, mouth tight. Mikey retreats to the kitchen to start on the dishes despite Will’s protests.

“Do you have…stuff you want me to get washed?” Will asks Abigail. His ears turn red, which means he’s just as embarrassed as she is about the whole washing someone else’s underwear thing. She figures they both might as well get over it if they’re going to live together.

“Sure, thanks,” she says. “I’ll go get it.”

When Will’s gone, she curls up under a blanket on the couch, reading. The occasional car passes. She thinks the gray haze along the horizon must be lights from New Orleans. _I don’t know where the universe came from or what happens to creatures when they die,_ she reads in her book. _I don’t know if the whole thing’s an unravelling accident or an inscrutable design. I don’t know how one should live—but I know that one should live, if one can possibly bear it._

“Cocoa?” Mikey asks, offering her a steaming mug. He’s finished dishes in the adjoining kitchen and he smells faintly of lemon dish soap. “I make it for my girls before bed sometimes, now that the sugar doesn’t keep them up.”

“Thanks,” Abigail says. She takes the mug and inhales the coiling steam. Under the scent of reconstituted cacao powder, she smells coconut milk. The first hot sip confirms it. It sends a bone-deep warmth through her. “It’s really good.”

“Little something-something. You looked like you needed cheering up,” Mikey says, settling in his overstuffed leather recliner.

“That obvious, huh.”

“When you have daughters, you get good at reading faces,” he says, smiling easily.

“How old are they?” she asks, never one to turn down a chance to steer a conversation where she wants it to go. “One of them is named Rosa, right?”

“Rosa and Ana. They’re thirteen.”

“Twins. Wow. They would have just been babies when you were Will’s partner,” she says. At the questioning tilt of his head, she adds, “He said you were partners until 2005.”

He nods once. “We were.”

“What was he like back then?” Abigail asks.

“A hell of a detective, but he rubbed people the wrong way. Didn’t like it when sergeants ordered him around. Didn’t want anything to do with the boy’s club. He didn’t make too many friends. Got shit from everyone for never using his gun, but he’d dress them down until they left him alone. Eventually he got a rep for being the lone wolf type, and he preferred it that way.”

 _Mikey’s better than the bunch. Heart of gold. But he isn’t squeaky clean_.

“You act like he’s your friend,” she points out, wondering if Will’s refusal to answer her question about being a dirty cop has anything to do with his strange attachment to Mikey.

“I owe him,” he says. “Besides, he was a good partner.”

“Am I allowed to ask?”

He laughs softly. “If a man lets a perp smash his face into a glass table at a coke bust so he can disarm a guy to save your life, he’s a good partner. If he takes his own boat and gets your grandma out of her flooded house, your aunts and uncles too, then he’s your friend. Doesn’t matter that he’s a reckless little asshole.”

“Flooded?”

He gives her a look. “Katrina.”

“Getting anything out of him is like pulling teeth,” Abigail says, sipping her cocoa. She’s getting down to the dregs, so she swirls the mug to reconstitute some of the chocolate sludge. “Sometimes he talks but he taps out pretty quick. I can get like, a half hour of conversation out of him.”

Mikey chuckles. “You’re doing better than I ever did. If it’s a crime scene, he’ll talk like he’s Hamlet, but try to ask about anything else, he’s a mute.”

“Were you Horatio?” Abigail asks.

The light gleams off a silver molar as he flashes a smile. With a soft groan, he gets out of his recliner to pull a photo album out of the bookcase. Flipping through a couple pages, he murmurs, “Here we go.”

He sets the album out on the coffee table between them, resettling in his chair with his elbows on his knees.

“Is that Will?” she says, laughing in surprise. He’s in a short-sleeved blue police uniform, clean shaven and short-haired, holding what must be one of Mikey’s daughters, still a toddler, up on one hip. His grin carves lines deep in his cheeks.

“Sure is,” says Mikey.

“He looks so young,” she says. He would have been closer to her age now than his own, which sits oddly with her.

There are other photographs of Will and Mikey at some sort of commendation, no smiles from Will here. Others still of Will with police dogs or with other members of Mikey’s family. There are few compared to the pages and pages of Mikey’s family and what must be other partners, but Will still holds this small slice of honor.

She thinks the one of Will sitting in a small, snub nosed motor boat next to a house flooded halfway up the front door is her favorite. It’s clear the water was higher from the stains that go all the way to the second story. In the captain’s seat, Will’s in a white t-shirt and shorts, sweaty, tan, a bit sunburnt, a faded green bruise on his cheekbone. He flips the photographer off with one hand and the other on a steering wheel. There’s a lit cigarette hanging in his mouth. His hair is a riot of short, wild curls.

_(This is a less burdened Will Graham, but you think you could rewind another ten years from this, and then another ten from then and you’d still recognize that dark unease sitting under his skin.)_

“He was young,” Mikey says. “But some people are born hungry.”

She thinks she knows what he means.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Will and Abigail listen to Sympathy for the Devil by the Rolling Stones in the car. 
> 
> Abigail is reading The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan (which is very good, I highly recommend.)
> 
> I, much like Will, have never seen Gilmore Girls.
> 
> Will's name Sassoon is both from the fic Herringbone and the war poet Siegfried Sassoon. It's a Jewish name and New Orleans has a really interesting Jewish history. 
> 
> I don't know how these chapters get to be so long, but I've been having a blast writing this and getting all your kind feedback. Thank you all for your kudos and comments.


	10. Hannibal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal has a few real conversations and one dream. Buster and designer shoes don't mix.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for brief antisemitism/homophobia

10\. Hannibal

* * *

_And I think in the end this was the question_

_that destroyed Agamemnon, there on the beach,_

_the Greek ships at the ready, the sea_

_invisible beyond the serene harbor, the future_

_lethal, unstable: he was a fool, thinking_

_it could be controlled. He should have said_

**_I have nothing, I am at your mercy._ **

— Louise Glück, from “The Empty Glass”

* * *

“You told Kade Prurnell I was investigating you,” Jack says, quiet despite defeat, the harsh fluorescent lights of the hallway outside the FBI administrative offices casting shadows over his bedrock face. He comes to a halt a meter away. A vein throbs in his temple and Hannibal scents the acrid stench of fury under his cologne. 

Hannibal blinks, taken aback. “I did not.”

“You asked me if I sent Will Graham to your doorstep,” Jack says, pique rising. 

He regards Jack cooly. “I assure you, I did not. I have always believed in the best of you, Jack. I value our friendship. I have never wanted you to go into the ground with your wife.”

Jack clenches and unclenches his jaw, sighing as he glances up at the fluorescent lights as if beseeching God. God’s not here. God won’t answer Jack’s prayers. The flying pulse in his neck slows ever so slightly.

“My wife,” Jack says, clearing his throat. “My wife still wants to talk to you. She…she agreed to try the soups. They need to be _vegetarian_.”

Hannibal holds back a smirk. “Of course. I can make an appearance tomorrow, if you are amenable. It will give me enough time to make something palatable for her.”

Jack stares over Hannibal’s shoulder, glowering at the closed door to the conference room Kade Prurnell requested. He pulls his lower lip between his teeth, shoulders bunched up tight with tension, then sighs. 

“Three?” he says. “She gets too tired in the evenings.”

“Yes, that’ll do,” Hannibal replies. 

The door swings open to reveal Kade Prurnell in all her hawkish countenance, dressed in an eggplant-colored jacket and skirt. 

“Agent Crawford,” says Ms. Prurnell. “Please stop conspiring and join me in the conference room.”

Bald irritation flashes over Jack’s face, but he follows the sweep of Kade Prurnell’s hand. 

“Jack,” Hannibal calls. “I forgive you.”

Jack works his jaw, chewing over a nameless, wordless feeling. 

“You’re early Dr. Lecter,” says Kade Prurnell, blocking any response from Jack. 

“My morning errands ran shorter than expected,” he says smoothly. “I can wait.”

Her eyes briefly narrow before she manages a polite nod. The conference room door shuts, leaving Hannibal alone in the hallway. He wonders who tore the entire plan apart. He wonders what will happen to Will, if it hasn’t already. He wonders if it was murder or mercy. 

_(He didn’t love you enough to leave with you.)_

While Jack converses with Kade, Hannibal wanders down the hall to the windows looking out on the courtyard. Sun filters hazily though thin clouds, casting everything in fuzzy light and shadow. The trees are still bare, with just the beginnings of buds. He wonders when the cherry blossoms will peak, with how late the cold has been. 

As he observes people mill past and branches sway in the cold, he sifts through his life, cataloguing and re-cataloging his nearest safe deposits should he need to take off quickly, considering how much more storage needs to be moved into the basement to avoid scrutiny, and if there are remaining patient notes that need to be discarded. Then, he considers what he’s going to do with himself now that he finds himself with both an abundance of time and an abundance of dogs. 

He has the better part of an hour still available, so he turns away from the window and wanders back into the less pleasantly lit portions of the hallway. Rows and rows of administrative offices of the finest bureaucrats, still asleep in their beds or stuck in traffic on their way to their minor jobs in their little offices. 

He catches the scent of Jo Malone Grapefruit before he hears the pad of Alana’s heels on the government navy carpet.

“Hannibal?” Alana says, eyes wide in surprise. “What are you doing here?”

“I was called here,” he says and something ugly twists in him as he realizes just how much Alana’s known about all this. At least she, unlike Will, had the sense to pull away. He’d prefer her blind.

“By Kade Prurnell?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“Good,” she breathes. “Maybe we can get some answers.”

He tilts his head, considering her. “Some clarity in such a muddled situation is more than wanted. It is necessary. Like surfacing for a breath of air when being pulled by the careless currents.”

She nods, pulling her bottom lip through her teeth. Alana stares blankly through the glass separating an unoccupied conference room from the hallway. Under the harsh fluorescent lights, her lower lashes gleam where they’re clumped together with unshed tears. 

“I keep wondering where it all went wrong,” Alana says, hoarse. “It’s like no one is who I thought they were. Will. Jack. Even you. I never thought you’d court violence like that. That you’d blur all those ethical boundaries between patient and psychiatrist. Was that you, or was that him?”

“What do you think, Alana?”

Her lip wavers. “I think there’s something in you that’s...attracted to danger. Will Graham saw that and courted it.”

“Are you worried about what skeletons Will saw in my closet, or are you disturbed by what that implies about his attraction to you?” Hannibal says. 

Her mouth opens, then closes. As the words meet their mark, she looks down sharply. 

“So there are skeletons.” 

“More like very old ghosts,” he says. 

She sighs and gives him a small nod of acceptance. 

“I...I keep thinking if I’d just tried a little harder to keep him out of the field, away from Jack...but I think Will wouldn’t have gone out there if he hadn’t, deep down, wanted to. How could I fight that?”

“Will has an exceptional ability to blind even himself to his true desires. He worked hard to blind us all,” he says. 

“What...what will you do with the dogs?” she asks. He blinks at her. She swallows thickly. “He’s not coming back, Hannibal.”

“And how do you know that?”

“I called him. He said he wanted to put _distance_ between you and him,” she says. Her lip curls. “That you’ll be _safe_ from him. That...we will _all..._ be safe from him.”

“Distance,” Hannibal repeats. 

“I think he regrets getting caught up in all of this,” she says. “I certainly do.”

Alana’s notion of Will simply never returning is patently absurd. Will always comes back, or rather, Will always comes back to Hannibal. When his mind blanks out, it’s Hannibal’s office he drives to in a fugue state. When he sleepwalks in the frozen night, it’s Hannibal’s kitchen he turns to. When he’s released from the BSHCI, it’s again Hannibal’s kitchen he creeps into like a thief, gun poised. When he wakes at the Verger estate after being pistol-whipped to the ground, he comes home to his dogs and Hannibal. 

He’s patient. 

Will won’t be gone forever, and when he returns, Hannibal will be there, waiting, caring for his dogs. 

“Would you like to keep any of the dogs?” Hannibal asks, because six is far too many to walk regularly in Charles Village.

“I’ll take Jack and Harley. Maybe Max too,” she sighs. “I’m so sorry about all this, Hannibal.” 

“I can keep Max for now, I’m quite fond of her,” Hannibal says, remembering how the Bernese Mountain Dog kept close to him all weekend, her head always within reach of his hand for an opportune scratch behind the ears. 

He thinks Abigail would have liked them, that she would have found comfort in Will’s rustic home and with his simple, ascetic life when her teenage restlessness with coursework, therapy and isolation on the coast became too much. Was she so lonely? Had she wanted to reach out to Will? Had she been more displeased and distrusting of Hannibal’s actions than she let on?

He takes that train of thought and brings it to an abrupt halt and then puts it behind a door in his mind for good measure. In this precarious position, pirouetting on an overturned bucket with only a snare to hold on to, he cannot fall into the holes of his mind. 

Jack exits the conference room, thunderous and righteous, and is quickly escorted away by one of Kade Prurnell’s agents. 

Kade beckons Hannibal inside the conference room, where he gently arranges his coat on a neighboring chair and unbuttons his suit jacket before sitting across the conference table from Kade. 

“Thank you for coming in on such brief notice, Dr. Lecter,” says Kade. 

“I imagine this must be as ugly a surprise for you as it is for me,” he says mildly.

“Ugly surprise doesn’t cover it,” she says. Huffing, she straightens her jacket. “It’s a complicated matter. Jack Crawford has been slapped on the wrist for misconduct before and therefore this makes this whole…thing…more glaring. I let him come back before. He has a good close rate. He has the sort of mental fortitude and instinct that make him well suited for the job. It’s not an undemanding job. I have to decide what to do with him, and I’m hoping our conversation will help me understand that.”

“I was rather hoping to be illuminated myself,” Hannibal replies. “You are telling me a friend of mine suspected me of being the Chesapeake Ripper and therefore engaged in our friendship and allowed me to consult under false pretenses.” 

“Yes,” she says simply. 

The scent of Freddie Lounds’ noxious drugstore hair mousse sits like poison in his lungs. 

“I suspect it involved Will Graham.”

“Yes.” 

Hannibal uncrosses and then recrosses his legs. “Perhaps you can tell me what Jack Crawford and Will Graham’s crimes entail?”

“Jack Crawford, with the help of Will Graham and the as-of-yet undetermined awareness of his official team, faked the death of Freddie Lounds to lure you, accused by them of being the Chesapeake Ripper, into exposing yourself,” she says, each syllable dripping with disdain.

“Miss Lounds is alive then?” he says. 

“Yes. Under FBI protective custody.”

“Quite the endeavor,” Hannibal says. “I am glad to hear Miss Lounds was not, in fact, severely burnt and her corpse desecrated.”

“I have to ask, did Will Graham confess to killing Freddie Lounds? Or discuss his plans to kill her with you?”

“For the sake of transparency, no.” Hannibal sighs. There’s a patch of white hairs from Buster on the cuff of his trousers. “If you wish to have any other information, I’m afraid I will have to invoke doctor-patient confidentiality.”

“Did Will Graham or Jack Crawford discuss the nature of Freddie Lounds’ murder during personal hours?” she asks. “Outside of the recorded work done during your billed consultation time?”

“No,” he says. 

“Thank you, Dr. Lecter.”

“Is that all?” he asks. “The extent of the allegations against Jack?”

“Yes,” she says. “Why, do you have other suspicions?”

“I merely wish to ascertain how forthright you are, considering you have a powerful motive not to reveal everything to a civilian,” Hannibal replies breezily. 

Kade’s nose twitches in displeasure. “I have a powerful motive to have this behind me. The method by which this happens is irrelevant to me.” She pauses, head tilting to the side not unlike a raptor inspecting prey rusting in the grass.“Will Graham has tended his resignation already from all his Bureau-associated posts. What to do with Agent Crawford, who supervised this endeavor, and the agents under the Bureau’s employ, who failed to report this, is murkier.”

“I see,” Hannibal says, still turning over Will’s formal resignation in his head. 

“I need to know if you’re going to file a formal report against the FBI.”

“Am I still under suspicion of being the Chesapeake Ripper?” Hannibal asks. 

“Will Graham has formally rescinded any accusations of you being the Chesapeake Ripper. Jack is steadfast in his accusation, but he doesn’t have any actionable evidence.”

“You spoke to Will already?” Hannibal asks, this surprising him as much as Will’s willing removal from federal employment. _Rescinded any accusations of you being the Chesapeake Ripper._

Kade’s expression darkens. “Yes. Rather early in the morning, even for my tastes.”

“What happens should I file a misconduct report?”

“I won’t be able to smooth this over. There will be an internal investigation. I’ll have to put out a warrant for the arrest of Jack Crawford for entrapment and Will Graham as an accessory to entrapment. We will have to subpoena all your patient records of Will Graham. They’ll be made into examples of FBI misconduct. Every case they’ve ever worked, every conviction will come into question. They will throw you into the national spotlight.”

“This isn’t the outcome you want,” Hannibal points out. 

Kade’s gaze is steely and unimpressed.

“I was prepared to cut Will Graham loose the first time. I was prepared to cut Jack Crawford loose the first time. I am still entirely prepared,” she says. Cold and unflinching, she stares at him. “I don’t want to let Internal Affairs come and bayonet the wounded, but if I have to, I will.”

“Do you know where Will Graham is?” he asks. “If you’ve spoken to him?”

“Will Graham has no desire to be associated with the FBI or its affiliates and doesn’t want to be contacted,” Kade says. 

_What has Will Graham done?_

“Did he say why?” 

“Yes,” Kade says, and offers no more, even when Hannibal lets the silence marinate long enough for most people to let something slip just to fill the silence. 

“It would give me little comfort to think of Jack wrapped up in an internal affairs investigation and potential jail time while his wife is terminally ill,” Hannibal says. “So I will be delaying filing anything. I appreciate being made aware.”

“The FBI thanks you, Dr. Lecter. As do I,” she says, kind. 

“Is there anything else you need from me, Ms. Prurnell? I appear to have six dogs to settle into a new home.”

“Good luck to you in that endeavor,” she says. “And, Dr. Lecter, the nondisclosure part of your consulting contract applies to this. You consulted on the case.”

Hannibal smiles. “Thank you for the reminder, but I assure you, I had no intentions of giving Freddie Lounds access to this story.”

“And I have no intention of letting her out of sight for the time being,” she replies. 

Hannibal runs his tongue along the back of his teeth, then takes a sharp inhale. “Do you believe Jack will let this go even if he does not have the support of the FBI?”

Kade raises a brow.

“No. I don’t. Which is why I would like to post an agent with you for the time being.”

Hannibal smiles. “That would give me some peace of mind. For how long?”

“Two days, unless you feel the need to have them around longer,” Kade says. 

“I shall keep you informed,” he smiles. Standing, he gathers his coat and once more buttons his suit jacket. 

She rises from her chair and ferries him to the door. 

“Thank you for your cooperation, Dr. Lecter,” she says. 

“Thank you for the transparency. And the protective detail. You understand if I may stay away from Quantico for a while, especially regarding any further consultations. I have been exceedingly patient with regards to the difficulty Jack Crawford has been through these past few months, but if there are new breaches of my civil liberties, you shall be hearing from my lawyer.”

Kade opens the door for Hannibal.

“Of course,” she says. Then, spotting Alana, calls, “Dr. Bloom, would you come in?”

And just like that, the door closes again, and it’s over. 

Kade illuminated two dark, muddled things for him. Will’s _distance,_ as Alana said, includes the FBI in the form of a formal resignation, and Randall Tier was neither planned nor sanctioned by Jack. If he were, they would threaten Will with charges of both murder and desecration of a corpse on top of accessory to entrapment. And either Jack is covering for Will or covering himself, or the whistleblower was not privy to this information. _Or, Jack suspects but doesn’t know._

He glances back to the closed conference room door. Alana is the obvious contender for that title; her proximity to Will’s departure suggests she forewarned him. He breathes out sharply. 

With a simmering restlessness he wanders down to the lab corridor where he’d seen the charred corpse of not-Freddie Lounds laid out on the steel examination table. Though the lights are on past the glass, there are no bodies out and no Jimmy Price or Brian Zeller milling around or arguing. 

He scents cats and Jimmy Price’s spearmint shampoo before he hears his footsteps. 

“Dr. Lecter,” Jimmy says. 

Jimmy’s not in his usual lab coat. Instead, he’s sporting a rather grandfatherly cardigan and khakis. 

“Special Agent Price,” Hannibal says, tipping his chin in greeting. 

“You got dragged in too?” he asks, glancing towards the ceiling where, three floors above, Kade is talking to Alana Bloom.

“I did,” Hannibal says. He drops the blank facade for a flicker of ugly hurt.

“I know the words of a sad, gay alcoholic don’t mean much, but uh, I’m sorry about all of this. I don’t know if you’re the Ripper or not and if you are the one who killed Bev, fuck you very much. I desperately miss her. But this whole thing was fucked. I know why Jack did it but I don’t think it was right,” says Jimmy. He breathes in, diaphragm as shaky as his hands. “That’s…that’s not even what I want to say, um. Someone who doesn’t care about you…doesn’t do what Will did.”

“What Will did,” Hannibal repeats, flat. 

“Yeah, uh. Call OIG on Jack,” says Jimmy. “He was the whistleblower.”

_Call OIG on Jack._ The phrase rings over and over with the hazy, dreamlike quality of church bells, or the deaf numbness after a gunshot goes off in the same room and one is bleeding out on a pool house floor, strung up by one’s neck. 

_(He didn’t love you enough to leave with you. Did he love you enough to spare you from Jack Crawford?)_

“Jack seemed to think I had done it,” Hannibal says archly. “And then he blamed Alana Bloom. What makes you certain it wasn’t either of us?”

Jimmy almost, _almost,_ rolls his eyes. Had he given in to temptation, Jimmy Price would have promptly found himself catapulted from the rainy-day snack list into more immediate danger. Like tonight. 

“Because when I was minding my business and looking up a new snowy owl sighting at BWI on the bird forum in the kitchen, Kade stormed by — mind you, this was 6 am this weekend — barking something to one of her little assistants about a ‘twitchy little man’ and ‘absolute PR disaster if this gets out’ and ‘unfortunately Graham is right,’” Jimmy says with a triumphant little arc of his brow. 

Hannibal takes in a quick breath through his mouth. 

“Are you going to tell Jack Crawford this?” Hannibal says. 

“He’s going to figure it out soon enough,” Jimmy replies, shrugging. “I am no more thrilled by two weeks mandatory evidence filing duty than he is about bereavement leave, and I really wish we hadn’t been dragged into all of this.”

Hannibal tilts his head. 

“Not even for Beverly Katz?” he asks. 

Some deep-seated well of courage sparks in Jimmy. “If you killed her, Jack made sure we’d never catch you for it. Jack tried to, ‘jack up the law and get under it,’ like Will said. I have to live with that.”

“I miss Beverly as well,” Hannibal says. “The world was a more vibrant place with her in it.”

Unfortunately, snooping in someone’s (a serial killer’s) home without a warrant isn’t conducive to staying alive, even if he regrets having to kill her. 

Jimmy nods, and Hannibal knows a dismissal when he sees one and he wanders out of the lab hallway towards the exit. There’s nothing left for him here. 

_He was the whistleblower._

Will risked arrest to cripple the investigation after he sat at Hannibal’s dining table over lamb and said that Jack wanted justice, that Jack wanted the truth. After all that, after begging Will to run, after Hannibal laid out his heart only to have it skewered so keenly and so brutally, after denying Hannibal thrice over for thirty pieces of silver, Will Graham gave the silver back and ran. There’s no ending like this. It never happens this way. There’s always a hanging and blood and a sacrifice and forgiveness.

* * *

Mid-afternoon light bleaches the brown fields around Will’s house. Bluejays call out overhead with their familiar hawk-like squawks, and the Mockingbirds imitate them back, followed by quick calls that sound like dogs barking. The air smells cold and unsettling. 

_Hard to hold on to anything. Damn slippery life._

Hannibal stands on the porch, watching the dogs run in the yard. Max outpaces Zoe and Ellie, though Buster finds another gear and overtakes him at the last moment. A familiar blue Prius is stopped at the beginning of the driveway by Agent Dawson, his scowling escort, parked in his black FBI car standing guard there. After a few traded words, Alana is allowed to pull up to the house. She climbs out of her car and the dogs peel away from their chase to crowd her, sniffing and yipping and wagging their tails in delight. A bright grin cracks over her face. It’s the first smile he’s seen on her in weeks, and naturally, it falls away when she registers his regard. 

“You have a protective detail,” she says.

The corner of Hannibal’s lip turns up in a wry smile. “Kade Prurnell believes Jack might confront me.”

Alana crosses her arms over her red coat.

“I have the same fear,” she says. “It’s good you have someone to watch over you.”

_Good someone’s watching you,_ he hears. 

“I have the dog’s leashes and veterinary records here,” Hannibal says, offering said things to Alana. 

With a simple passing of papers and not a single word except those of goodbye to Jack and Harley, Alana is gone. Their pack is now four and Hannibal stares down the drive for a silver Volvo that won’t appear. 

“Abandonment requires expectation,” Will says. 

Hannibal stares at him and Will stares back, leaning against one of the porch columns in a black sweater and a green jacket. The ones with the bullet hole and bloodstains. Something churns in Hannibal, like rip currents under placid water. He tears his eyes away from Will without responding and calls the dogs inside behind him. 

He figures he should give the house a proper goodbye for now. He cleans out the refrigerator, packing anything useful into one of Will’s spare coolers, like the frozen trout and chicken, and tossing anything suspicious, like Will’s strange collection of hot sauces nearing their expiration dates and an old carton of whole milk. 

( _You didn’t want to be saved from the FBI, you wanted a family. Your family.)_

Tidying doesn’t take long, and neither does cleaning and collecting dog beds, leashes and toys. Buster, Ellie, Max and Zoe mill around underfoot seeking reassurance as their lives are overturned. He reasons that, when Will returns, he’ll want to pick up the dogs. Until then, he’ll do as he offered and care for them. 

Upstairs is the same as it was over a year ago. Some boxes have shifted. There’s a new collection of dog shampoo in the tub. But, overall, the old turned-leg oak double bed and matching dresser in the master bedroom, with their single-sized counterparts in the smaller bedroom, remain unchanged. On second glance, the bed frame in the larger room has been moved a few inches recently. There’s a new scuff on the hardwood floor from the legs. The quilt, though smoothed down, smells faintly of Will’s bath products but not of him. The scent is too faded for him to place. When he checks under the bed, he notices a scuff on the corner of one of the floorboards.

Under a loose floorboard in what’s supposed to be the master bedroom, Hannibal finds a case of 9mm bullets and another case of shotgun shells. Tucked under them lies a pack of Marlboro Reds, stale and from the late 90’s or early 2000’s by their packaging design, and a small folio of 4x6 film photographs. 

Hannibal exhales, settling more comfortably on the floor. 

The photographs have the hazy, golden quality of cheap Kodak film. The backing is yellowed, and each photograph is dutifully marked with the place and year in cheap blue or black ballpoint ink. The people in the photographs are strangers in the way a highway is a stranger — somewhere you’ve never been before, but intimately familiar in the way it echoes everywhere else you’ve ever been. They’re not in any order. 

A dark-haired, rail-thin woman with glittering eyes and Will’s ringlets stands at the end of an old, sinking wooden dock into a duckweed-coated swamp with her hands on her hips in the photograph that says _Lafayette, 1977_. There are some photographs of the same woman with a baby, and a few more of a man who must be Will’s father by the sharp line of his jaw. There’s a white shotgun-style house in one of the photographs, overflowing with lilacs, but no identifiable number or street names. 

_Atherton, 1990,_ is unmistakably Will. All coltish limbs and over-long curls. He scowls in front of a tan pickup truck. A blinding gold sun makes him squint at the camera, and a long shadow peeks out over the lower frame of the photograph, almost touching Will’s dirty red sneakers. His knees are skinned under his blue shorts. _Key Largo, 1986,_ is Will on a sailboat holding a redfish by a hook through its mouth. It’s nearly the size of his torso, and Will is smeared in so much zinc oxide sunscreen under a blue baseball cap, that, with his water-splattered red shirt, he looks like the French flag. Sun gleams off the white boat hull and the aquamarine water. 

There are others with different iterations of Will Graham and his unnamed father. On different boats and bodies of water. There are trailers and run-down rental houses and cars in places he’s not sure he could triangulate due to their limited sameness. There are oysters shucked and fish gutted and the same, mercurial boy shifting through time. Sunburnt, then pale. Doe-eyed, then sharp-eyed. Scrawny, then coiled with a lean, hard-won meanness. Skinned kneed, then asleep on a tattered sofa, _Moby Dick_ open face-down on his belly. 

Will Graham is the sum of a history. Blue collar upbringing, rough hands, boat motors and fish, the cheap, filling foods of the American South. If Hannibal closes his eyes, he can imagine the red beans and rice laden with spices, the crackle of fish in oil, the salty-creamy taste of grits. Will’s father would have been no chef, but as good a cook as he could be. He would have been kind and gruff and clever enough to see the strange darkness in his son equally as the fragile tenderness. Protected it, though he’d never be able to fully understand it. Will would have used his father as a shroud: the plaid, the boats, the dogs, all stitched around him like armor. 

_(You spent so much. Blood and breath and time and your own veils and your sister’s name and thirty pieces of silver. You spent so much carving him into a shape that could know you, a shape that could share this meaningless life with you so that you could make meaning together, and found something malleable but somehow immutable. You, consummate renouncer of the influence of your own history, never imagined there was any more you needed to know about Will Graham than what existed in front of you.)_

He feels a displaced and unwelcome pang in his chest when he notices the photographs trail off as Will grows older. He graduates college in 1998. He’s in a police uniform the same year. There are no photographs after that. Will Graham is more than the sum of a history. More than the sum of muscle and bone and sinew. Hannibal could gorge himself on every memory, every thought, every word from Will, and never be satisfied. 

_(You’re no longer sure you knew the Will Graham who existed in front of you. You struck a light in a dark room, but you cast a new shadow.)_

The tucks the photographs back in the folio and under his arm, putting the other things back in place. When he makes his way back downstairs, folio tucked safely into the inner pocket of his wool coat, the dogs underfoot once more, Will’s home has another visitor. A distinctive burgundy Jeep, followed by another FBI car, creeps up the driveway. For a man as antisocial as Will Graham, he has no shortage of callers. Hannibal steps out onto the porch, letting the dogs tumble out barking. 

Freddie, with an acrid chemical wave of hair mousse, steps out of her car. The dogs make a beeline for her. She stills but doesn’t flinch as they leave fur all over her leopard-print tights and track mud on her iridescent green cowboy boots. He rather wishes they’d tear her to pieces until all he can smell is a charnel house. Anything but her hair product.

“Ah, Miss Lounds. Congratulations on returning from the dead,” Hannibal says. 

“Thank you, I was told there was a good showing at my funeral,” she says. “Flattering someone thought to desecrate my corpse.”

Hannibal smiles a glacial smile. 

“I’m surprised Agent Dawson let you through.”

“Him and Agent Ford are buddies,” she says, gesturing to the second vehicle parked next to her Jeep and the scowling thirty-something man with a Marines haircut stepping out, hand poised on his holster. 

“ _Out of the ash/ I rise with my red hair/ and I eat men like air,_ ” he says. “Is that why you’re here? To seek retribution against the man who allegedly murdered you?”

“Oh, trust me,” she snorts, arms crossing over her chest. The dogs lose interest in her and wander back toward the porch, wary of all the cars. “He wanted to. I know we were staging the whole thing, but I think if I hadn’t had Jack Crawford on the phone, he really would have. _Very_ enthusiastic. Took me about a week to get my car window fixed after he smashed it in with a tire iron.”

Hannibal blinks.

“That’s quite the accusation,” he says. 

“It’s funny that after all that time he spent convincing everyone that _you_ were the Ripper, he’s the one who disappears. Retracts any accusations. And here you are—” She flicks her eyes up and down— “left behind…watching his dogs.”

“Looking for answers amongst the dead grass?” Hannibal asks, gesturing to the flat fields. “Breaking and entering under FBI escort is bold, even for you.”

“I think you’re the one with the answers. Where’s Will Graham, Doctor Lecter?” Freddie asks, baring her teeth in a smile that’s light years away from her eyes.

“I confess I don’t know,” he shrugs. “Will left for a fishing trip and never returned. Have you asked Jack Crawford?” 

“He said Will’s ah, _gone fishing_ ,” she says, with a wry and poisonous smile. “But you can’t expect me to believe that. What do you think? Witness protection? Did the real Ripper get to him? Or did he pull the rug out from under everyone and disappear just before he got his own investigation?”

“Your guess is as good as mine, Miss Lounds,” he says. 

“There used to be more dogs,” she says. “Three more, in fact.”

“Indeed,” he says. 

They stare each other down, the three meters between them strung taught as the strings of a harpsichord, waiting to be plucked. 

“The last time I talked to Will, he asked me to do something for him. Or, rather, to not do something,” she says, lifting her chin to look down her nose at him, even if he looms above her on the porch. Hannibal tilts his head to say, _continue._ “He said, ‘you can write about me, you can write about Hannibal. But leave Abigail alone. Let her rest in peace.’”

_(He’s never called you by your name.)_

The words hang in the air. All those mingled names. Will, Hannibal, Abigail. He hears the notes from Chopin’s _Preludes, Op:28, No. 15_ drip through him like raindrops. There’s no lofty smugness in Freddie’s expression, just a cold thread of unshakability. 

“I heard he owed you an interview,” Hannibal says.

Freddie hums dispassionately.

“He didn’t think he was going to survive you,” she says. 

He blinks against the unwelcome maw of black emptiness in him that Will left behind, against the tide of bleak fury and twisted betrayal and the need for Will to understand even a fraction of what is rending within him. 

“And he wasn’t going to let go of what happened to Abigail Hobbs,” Freddie continues. “Neither will I. It’s why I let him kill me. Did you kill him?”

He itches to watch the light drain out of her eyes, but at this point even he can contend with God’s design to spare her and his own curiosity to where she may lead him. 

“No.”

Did you kill Abigail Hobbs?”

“No.”

She blinks. “Huh. Either you lied both times or you told the truth both times. I’m leaning towards truth.”

“I think you should get going, Miss Lounds,” Hannibal says, giving Agent Ford a pointed look. 

He waits for Freddie’s car and her sentry to disappear down the winding road before gathering the dogs and his coat, folio of photographs still tucked safely away from the likes of Freddie Lounds. He’s nothing if not fiercely covetous of Will Graham. 

_(If you find a scribbled post-it note in a junk drawer that says ‘jitterbee’ and ‘eagle claw’ in Will’s scrawl and pocket it, that’s your business.)_

He grabs the waxed canvas coat and, locking up Will’s house, resolves to buy a pair of good walking boots. The dogs shuffle around the porch. A sharp command to stay close keeps them from bolting off into the fields. The dogs save for Buster are subdued in the back seat with Will’s homemade jerky, slobbering all over the plastic sheet Hannibal usually uses to transport bodies. Buster, currently in the footwell of the passenger seat and desperately clamoring to climb over the gearshift and into Hannibal’s lap, is less easily mollified by food. 

_(You’re not sure why you offered to take in the dogs. Did you want their comfort? Did you want something to care for in the absence of your Schrödinger’s daughter? Did you covet them the way you covet everything in Will’s life? Your inability to figure out which train of thought brought you to the point of loading four creatures into your car to shed evidence all over it disturbs you.)_

* * *

Under no circumstance had Hannibal predicted being here. 

“Buster!” Hannibal scolds. “Drop the Gucci loafer _immediately._ ”

Buster growls, weight in his haunches as he furiously darts around the foyer. His tail wags so hard his whole body trembles. 

“Buster, _drop it,_ ” Hannibal says, dangling a piece of homemade jerky out in front of him. The rest of the dogs are safely and peacefully corralled in the study off the dining room, while Buster, incorrigible rat that he is, refuses to be contained.

“Please do not make me put you in the soup, Buster,” Hannibal says. 

Eventually Hannibal gets a hold of the terrier but the loafer is beyond saving. He sets Buster in the study with his hard-won prize. Better the loafer than his velvet slipper chairs or the legs of the mahogany desk. Max whines and licks at his hand when he goes to leave. He gives her one last scratch behind the ears before slipping out the back door and past the distracted FBI agent supposed to be watching the house. 

He picks up his secondary car in a garage a few blocks over. The Baltimore streets are mostly empty as he drives through endless stoplights. Red-green-yellow reflections tessellate the rain-slick road, rippling and swaying as a strong spring wind gusts through the buildings. He parks close to the Parkway theatre and quickly, to avoid irreparable damage to his kidskin leather jacket, makes his way inside. 

He’s early to avoid the mill of people who are tortoiseshell-glasses tattooed art students or their older counterparts in their professor’s outfits. Even in a more subdued outfit, he’s recognizable to his usual crowd and considering he’s watching an evening showing of Through a Glass Darkly for lack of anything better to do or any better company, he’d prefer to remain obscure. 

As he takes a seat in the back of the theatre, lights half-dimmed, he spares a thought for poor Franklyn. His former patient would have, undoubtedly, discovered this activity of his. He would have watched the entire collection of Ingmar Bergman’s films and they would have had hours of therapy under the haze of anxious sweating trying to make Franklyn more aware of his own personhood and less focused on the desire to know Bergman and be his friend. It would have been incredibly dull. 

_(‘I don’t know if love is proof of God’s existence or if love is God himself,’ you hear, your faulty Swedish filled in by subtitles dancing across the screen mixing with the sweeping notes of Bach.)_

A gray ocean ripples over the screen. A rocky beach. A skeleton of an old boat slowly succumbing to tides. Will’s photographs overlay themselves. Boats and water and muddy shores. 

_(‘For you, love and God are the same.’)_

Hannibal slips out of the theater ahead of the throng of film students. There’s a lull in the rain that pulls him to wander a roundabout route to his car, swinging several blocks wide to come upon a street full of bars and restaurants. 

A group of men slosh out of a bar, reeking of beer and vodka on their Federal Hill uniforms of khakis and boat shoes. One of them shouts about how his new dog keeps pissing all over the floor while another is fumbling with his phone to call a cab. He narrowly avoids someone grabbing onto him, sidestepping neatly. 

“Hey, man!” says Blonde Crew Cut with the dog. “Nice jacket!”

Hannibal does a half-turn. “Thank you,” he says dryly, assessing the four-man group over. 

He could pick out their faces again if needed, though that’s only because of his exceptional visual memory. Most of the banker-investor types in Federal Hill are all completely forgettable in their overgrown fraternity sameness. Middling middle children looking for get-rich-quick schemes, trashing the historical charm of Baltimore with their vulgar, overpriced developments erasing and displacing lead-paint row home collapses that never really belonged to anyone. That the city created and wants to sweep under the rug. He thinks the people who were pushed out are far less rude than those that have pushed their way in; poverty is not an ugliness anyone chooses. 

He keeps walking, leaving their drunken swaying and wailing at his back. 

“—Fuckin’ Rothschild shit, seriously,” says Blonde Crew Cut. “I swear, everyone at the firm is just being so PC.”

Hannibal bristles, itching to turn around to ask for a business card. A train of thought considers following the man home to determine an address, then filing him away to deal with later. Another train of thought considers the dogs waiting for him at home and the small possibility of finding his mahogany writing desk with little teeth marks gnawed into it. 

He ducks into an alleyway, deciding that his excursion ought to be cut short. Amid the scents of a pungent alleyway dumpster, he hears footsteps behind him. 

“You got a light, man?” says Blonde Crew Cut. 

“I’m afraid not,” Hannibal says. 

“Where’d you get that jacket?” he says, instead of leaving well enough alone. Hannibal ignores him and keeps walking. “Hey man, don’t ignore me.”

Hannibal stops and turns. In the dark, his stalker appears infinitely less inebriated than he did before. 

“You come from Gallery One?” Blonde Crew-Cut sneers. 

Hannibal hasn’t been to the bar in question, but he knows of it. The accusation slots things in place. This isn’t just a rude overgrown child, it’s a pig who thinks himself a predator. 

“What’s your name?” Hannibal asks. 

“Brett,” he says. 

Dropping into a lunge followed by a heel-turn, he catches hold of Brett’s jacket collar and slams his head against the alley wall with a sharp, sickening thud of cracking temporal bone. Blood blooms in a black, sticky arc across red brick where the dim halogen street light doesn’t quite reach. The body crumples. The man groans, spitting up blood. 

“So sorry to do this,” Hannibal says lightly, belying how his hands simmer with fury. “But you were quite rude.”

The man trembles, rolling dazed and glassy-eyed on his back. 

“Well, Brett, an old friend of mine, my piano teacher, really, would have been terribly upset to hear some things you said earlier. Do you remember them?” Hannibal asks, looming over Brett. 

The man’s temporal bone is no firmer now that hospital Jell-O. He won’t be alive much longer, and will take leave of consciousness because of severe meningeal swelling even sooner. 

“N...no,” Brett says, shaking like a leaf. Emile wouldn’t have had much to say about this, having been a waspish but ultimately delicate creature. This is for the pure, vicious satisfaction of watching a body full of light and air and color, which has outlived its potential for any beauty, turn to nothing but meat.

“Well, I do. And it’s quite rude to follow men into alleyways looking for general unpleasantness.”

Brett just gurgles around the blood pouring into his mouth, though Hannibal makes out something rather derogatory of his supposed sexuality. 

“Terrible, when one outlives one’s psychological usefulness. You have lived an insipid, insignificant life, Brett,” he hisses, as Brett slips out of consciousness. He gives the vital organs another minute or two with how damaged the brainstem is. “And the jacket is Belstaff.”

He snaps Brett’s neck for good measure and leaves the body in the alleyway as the rain begins again. The world, lost in a patter of rain on pavement, goes quiet and dreamlike. Blissful silence in all the corridors of his mind. He tilts his face up to the heavens and lets the blood spatter wash off his face. 

* * *

“I wanted to surprise you. And you — you wanted to surprise me,” Hannibal says, walking up to Will, who stands at the head of the dining table in mute shock, staring at the fresh corpse of Abigail laid out across it, her throat slashed ear to ear. Blood drops onto the floor in a sticky, slow _drip drip drip_. 

He cradles Will’s face. “Time did reverse. The teacup was brought together. A place was made for Abigail in your world.”

“She’s…she’s dead now,” Will says. 

He cups Will’s cheek. 

“And Freddie Lounds is alive,” he says, and with a single, steadying breath, thrusts the linoleum cutter into Will’s stomach and drags it through flesh and viscera. 

Will’s cry of pain cuts Hannibal in equal measure. He grabs onto Hannibal even as his knees buckle and blood pours down his shoes. 

“Why didn’t you come with me?” Hannibal whispers, stroking Will’s hair as he holds him close. He memorizes the scent of Will’s skin under the thick stench of blood. “I gave you forgiveness, why didn’t you take it?”

Will gasps for air against pain. Divine and burning in his suffering. 

“Rather vain of you to offer forgiveness,” Will hisses, teeth clenched tight. “What about my forgiveness?”

He slips from Hannibal’s arms inch by inch until he finally sinks to the dining room floor, clutching at the gash in his belly. Blood trickles over his hand, hot and wet and sticky, stinking of metal.

“Why did you run, Will?” says Hannibal. He stands over Will, coiled, knife dripping with blood. Tears burn tracks down his cheeks. “Why did you deny me, then deny me your reckoning? You sent your regards to Jack, patched up my life like a completed autopsy. Left me for dead.”

“Think. Think, Hannibal. What’s missing? What don’t you understand?” Will gasps around a mouth full of blood. He’s pale and clammy with shock, fighting for every second of consciousness. “Do you understand? Do you understand now what you did to me? I let you in and you abandoned me. You changed me. Were you listening? To what you were creating? Or were you just listening to a dream?”

“I let you know me. See me. I gave you a rare gift, but you didn’t want it.”

“Didn’t I?” Will asks, more air than sound. Then, with a last tremble of strength, “You know what you have to do, Hannibal.”

That bright fire he’d seen more than a year ago in Jack Crawford’s office, in the eyes of a man who saw too much, terrified of the dark thing sleeping inside him, stutters and falters until it’s gone. Until all the incandescence of Will is gone.

His hands shake so badly he can hardly take apart the buttons of Will’s shirt to expose his pale, smooth chest. The knife wobbles and catches as he opens up Will’s belly up to the sternum. Nothing surgical about this. This is butchery, only he’s not sure Will’s being butchered. Tears mingle with the ocean of blood seeping into his clothes. Salt tracks burn his face. Far off, there are sirens, but as his hand finds purchase around a still, warm heart, then detaches it from the mess of blood and viscera, he doesn’t care. 

“Such courage,” Hannibal says, tracing Will’s cheek for the last time, “I’m sorry, my love.” 

He sinks his teeth into Will’s raw heart.

* * *

Hannibal blinks into wakefulness, heart pounding, achingly bereft, and sick to his stomach. The pillow under his cheek soaked with tears. Staggering to the bathroom, he drinks cold water from the tap until he no longer tastes blood and raw meat on his tongue. He wants to search himself for the wound where Will surgically cleaved himself away; a cut so smooth he didn’t feel it happening until it was too late; an incision that, unstitched, bleeds and bleeds and bleeds. 

_(Distance. He’s not coming back.)_

He dials Will’s number. It goes straight to voicemail with the brusque message he couldn’t forget even if he tried. ‘ _You’ve reached Will Graham. Leave a message.’_

( _He’s still alive and you didn’t kill him. You need the reminder.)_

He showers and performs his daily ablutions. Mid-shave he curls his lip at the _thing_ in the mirror with graying temples and greenish-blue stains of mortal exhaustion under his eyes. He feels, for the first time in a long time, a stab of compassion for poor, pitiful Franklyn. Skinned of all his polish and charm, is this really all Hannibal is? A grotesque mass of blood and viscera in the shape of a man, writhing and wanting and lonely? 

_(Are you really, after all this time, just a man?)_

After dressing, he lets the dogs out of the study and they tear ahead of him through the dining room into the kitchen, chasing the scent of old food. When he stumbles down to the kitchen behind them, he staggers and blinks. Dishes from dinner, china stained with a thick glaze port wine reduction, saucepan coated in char from meat, litter the sink. Had he really not bothered with the dishes last night? 

The dogs demand to go outside, so he cracks open the door to the back yard and watches them sniff around for optimal sections of grass and shrubs on which to relieve themselves, then wipes paws when they come inside. Though they’ve never been in Hannibal’s home before now, they oblige paws and wait quietly, occasionally snuffing at his hair or his ears. 

They keep him company as he does the dishes. Ellie and Zoe curl up by the heating vent at the baseboard near the sink, while Max and Buster stare out the patio door at the passing fauna. 

He dries the last of the dishes and stands with his pink hands on the edge of the sink. Gold light streams through the back garden. There’s a cardinal on the Japanese maple. There’s the skyline of downtown Baltimore. And where they’ve always been, there’s his house and the kitchen and the quartz counters and the sink and Hannibal. Everything is where it’s always been. An ordinary mirage. 

He had made a breakfast of brown bread and smoked mackerel for him and Mischa in the vast basement kitchen, as if their parents hadn’t died the day before. He had made _pain perdu_ with Abigail a little over a week ago. He’d shared a whiskey with Will in his office after they’d returned Mason Verger to his farm. Meals preceding disaster. Their own sort of last supper. 

A visible catastrophe is surely better than a quiet collapse; an ugly, twisted scar surely better than a subdermal contusion and that better than an invisible mark on the soul or the mind. He turns his hands up from where they rest on the edge of the sink until the sunlight sloshes over the red wounds on his wrists. Proof that Will Graham left a mark.

* * *

“I had the strangest feeling the last time we spoke,” Bella says, her melodic voice gone wheezy. She takes a drag of oxygen before taking a plastic spoonful of the thin-broth soup Hannibal brought over. Jack had said, _she can’t use metal, ‘cause it’s all she tastes_. She sips, pauses, then sips again. He takes it as a victory against chemotherapy-destroyed tastebuds. “Like it was the last time we’d talk. And here we are.”

“Fate and circumstance,” Hannibal says. “They have a funny way of dismantling all our best-laid plans.”

“How do you prepare someone for loss?” Bella asks. 

“You cannot,” he says, thinking of gold curls soaked in blood. Of his dream the night before where he’d cut out Will’s heart and eaten it once he’d dimmed the light from his eyes. Of the dull emptiness of Will’s abandoned house. “You cannot prepare for an absence. Your husband will watch the spaces you once moved in and find in them unbearable emptiness.”

“Unbearable is always a lie, unless you die right after,” she says, with a wry, twisted smile. “This illness will become unbearable for me. For Jack, it will be bearable.”

“Does that comfort you? That he will bear it?” Hannibal asks. 

“I love my husband,” she says. “I love him. I want him to live beyond me.”

“He doesn’t need to follow you in the ground.”

And he won’t. Not yet. There’s a deeply annoyed Agent Dawson downstairs and a promise Hannibal made to Bella standing between Jack and his demise.

“I’m happy he’s here, even if it poisons the good memories. I thought he’d never slow down, not even for me,” Bella says.

Hannibal considers her words. “A gift, then. These moments with you.”

“I heard it was a gift granted by Will Graham,” she says with a soft snort of wry humor. 

( _You wonder if you will ever get used to hearing his name like this — like you already buried him and now everyone but you got the memorandum about reading a eulogy.)_

“I heard the same,” says Hannibal. 

Her tired eyes focus onto him, pinning him with a knowing gaze. “Will Graham leaves a very empty chair, doesn’t he?” 

“What distinguishes one empty chair from another?” Hannibal asks.

“The fuller it is, the emptier it will be,” she says. Her eyes are heavy with knowing. “We never truly know how profoundly alone we are in the world unless we experience connection. You can never be who you were before love.”

“Love is a kind of death,” he says. 

He sits in silence with Bella. She watches him as she braves through the soup; he studies the folds of the blanket draped over her lap. The sun sinks, heaving golden beams backwards through the windowpane and across the bed Bella Crawford will die in. It already feels like a funeral. It started three days ago with an unanswered call. It’s not Will’s funeral. It’s his own. Will’s the executioner and undertaker both. 

_(He gives you back thirty pieces of silver. You pluck two from the bag as payment for Charon because there’s no returning to the green world above. No one is returning, least of all Will. Only going forward, as long as you pay the fare.)_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal quotes Sylvia Plath's _Lady Lazarus_


	11. Will

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will and Abigail find a place to live. There's truth and there are consequences.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Approximately a 45 minute read. Huge shout out to my girlfriend who helped me pull this chapter together (and ngl the actual plot for the rest of this fic).

11\. Will

* * *

_At night you hear a scratch on a screen_

_outside your window. Cicada or_

_perpetrator. You cut off the light,_

_pull the covers over your head._

_Tomorrow morning_

_you either wake up or you don’t._

— Barbara Conrad, from “An Eagle’s Wing, the Leg of a Deer”

* * *

Wet clothes whirl and slap around the dryer, rhythmic like a muffled heartbeat. Under the fluorescent lights, finally alone, Abigail’s self-possessed practicality and her incisive determination to live slowly ebb out of him. 

_Drip._

_Drip._

_Drip._

Will didn’t expect survival. He hadn’t calculated for Abigail. All he’d known was the fairy tale couldn’t last and that he’d either burn Jack or burn Hannibal and either end up in prison or at the end of a knife. Contrapasso. Let the punishment befit the crime. No one gets to play footsie with the devil, let alone pull the wool over the devil’s eyes, and go on with life unscathed. 

_Drip._

_Drip._

_Drip._

He turns slowly in his seat to find the stag hovering over him, followed by a steady trail of blood. It heaves down to its knees until it rests its head on Will’s lap. Its glossy raven feathers drip blood down on the linoleum floor, a great burgundy-black pool creeping outward from a gaping wound in its chest. The stag shudders. Its heavy, strained breaths mist his hand as he soothes it. 

“I’m sorry,” Will says, not sure why he’s saying it but knowing he needs to. Will’s the one who inflicted the mortal wound. He can’t do anything to quell it.

He itches. A sharp, throbbing pressure twists out from under his ribs and leaves him gasping. With a sharp sting, and a fountain of blooming blood, antlers burst from his chest. Blood trickles down his arms, staining the stag’s quivering velvet nose. Will can’t breathe. Neither of them can. Neither one of them can survive the other.

“Your laundry’s done, man,” says the heavyset man minding the night shift at the laundromat.

Will startles, blinking the blood away. Only a dream. Only ever a dream. He’s clammy, heart pounding like he’s run a five-minute mile.

“Thanks,” Will says, struggling to rein in the out-of-breath waver of his voice.

He shovels the clean, warm laundry back into a duffel bag and steps out into the lukewarm night, thick with the piercingly familiar smell of dirt, lake-shore and diesel fumes. The stag doesn’t follow him to his car, but he turns anyway, just like he checks the backseat and rearview mirror all the way back to Mikey’s waiting for his familiar apparitions. 

“Get everything you wanted out of Mikey?” Will asks when he creeps through Mikey’s front door with their bag of laundry. It’s after midnight. Exhaustion beyond the lack of sleep, beyond the lingering hangover, beyond the drive, holds him by the throat and squeezes and squeezes. 

“He told me about that drug bust you guys did. The coke one,” Abigail says, cross-legged on the sofa with an empty mug of cocoa in her hands. 

She’s alone. Mikey must have gone off to bed.

Will gives her a twisted smile. “What did he, uh, tell you?”

He sets the duffel bag down on the unoccupied leather recliner and peers down at the photograph left out on the coffee table. It’s a flooded white house and him, filthy and exhausted, flipping the camera off. He’s curious about how it ended up out here and if Abigail is going to ask about it.

_(Some things you can’t talk about.)_

“That you got your face smashed into a glass table but you still saved his life,” Abigail says, tossing her hair out of her face as she looks up.

He snorts. “Lucky that glass was an inch thick and didn’t smash, or I’d be a hell of a lot uglier. I broke my nose and cracked my cheekbone.”

“Is that why it’s a little off-center?”

“What?” he says. Abigail smirks, triumphant. “Oh, shut up.”

They fold the clean laundry together under a mutual pact to not feel awkward about it.

“I keep thinking about what you were doing for Jack. All those serial killers. Filling your head with crime scene after crime scene. I kept thinking about how awful it must have been for you,” Abigail murmurs.

Police work was simpler. Homicides were solved in 24 hours or they weren’t at all. He understood the working poor and the disenfranchised in a way that didn’t leave him stained. 

“It’s an ugly part of life most people never touch.”

She shakes her head. “No, I meant — everyone is always talking about your special imagination or how you’re insane ‘cause you can think like a killer. You were a detective once. You were good at it. You weren’t just looking and divining someone out of thin air. You were hunting. Looking at the evidence.”

His hands still, mid-way though folding a shirt. 

“Thanks,” he mumbles back, that thicket of antlers catching in his throat once more.

They turn out the lights, clothes re-packed, and settle in their respective beds for the night. The overstuffed sofa for Abigail, and for him a pile of blankets on the floor. 

He can’t remember the last time he spent so much time with someone. He’d been asleep for much of the drive to Minnesota with Hannibal. He’d been on stakeouts with partners. He’d hauled people out of houses with Mikey after Katrina until he couldn’t lift his own head from the deck of his boat. He’d spent a disastrous weekend in an Acadian cabin with a girlfriend.

No, the last time he’d spent this much time with anyone, it had been Beau Graham’s last weeks alive.

He sleeps fitfully through the night until he can’t keep his eyes closed without seeing blood or antlers behind them. The tendrils of Abigail’s black, coiling dreams crawl over his skin like carnivorous insects on a severed limb. Sleep won’t find him. Certainly not peaceful sleep. So he puts the battery back in his phone and checks his email, squinting at the tiny, over-bright screen in the dark.

The admins for the Academy want to know if he’s going to take on his classes again for the summer or fall terms or if he’s still on ‘sabbatical.’ He imagines writing back, saying, _I’m quitting to run away with the girl who I allegedly murdered and then definitely thought my psychiatrist murdered. Also, said girl is manipulating the absolute hell out of me because I know she never liked me much and liked me less when I scared the shit out of her in Minnesota, but I’m sticking around because she doesn’t have anywhere else to go and frankly, I’m curious what she’ll do. So no, Gabe the Admin, I am not teaching my class ever again._

The following email from HR with paperwork for his formal termination, Kade Prurnell personally CC’d, has a better answer for Gabe the Admin. His resignation has gone through. He’s been demoted a retirement grade and will be collecting an enticingly large severance check he suspects isn’t in accordance with Federal termination guidelines. The rules are clear. He cannot consult by proxy or in absentia for the FBI, he cannot look at collateral from case files, and he cannot operate in the capacity of a federal agent. This extends to his teaching post. 

( _This is the outcome you wanted, but you’d still like to drive Kade Prurnell’s shoe heel through her head for the vicious, hateful pleasure of it.)_

It’s this errant reminder of how unsafe he is for people that drives him outside before the sun is up. Will lights up a cigarette on Mikey’s front porch. The sun isn’t quite up yet, only a gray gleam on the Eastern horizon above the roofs of rows and rows of Shotgun-style houses like Mikey’s. He leaves his shirt unbuttoned over his t-shirt, basking in the tepid warmth of Louisiana in early spring. If he had a black coffee with chicory, he could be ten years ago. 

Being back in the South should feel like going back to before Hannibal, back to something that belonged to only him, back to before he was a killer. But all the miles do is peel back his skin and show more of the same stained Will Graham underneath.

_(It’s one of the closest things you have to a home, to a place you came from, only because that’s where your mother’s bones are. The only thing closer than that is the open sea, because that’s where Daddy’s ashes ended up. And now you’re no one’s prodigal son.)_

The porch door opens. Mikey comes to stand beside him, offering him a cup of coffee. He’s dressed. Even his pants are pressed. Will thanks him after a moment’s disorientation at the creeping lightness of the sky. 

“Still having nightmares?” Mikey asks, because he’s Mikey and he doesn’t really care how weird and standoffish and indecisive Will is. Beverly was like that.

“Always had bad dreams,” Will says. 

“As bad as after Katrina?” he says. 

He used to dream about drowning in an attic, unable to claw his way out. He used to dream about finding the bodies of dogs and kids when the water receded. His dreams are different now. More like throwing Abigail on a rack of antlers or cutting Hannibal’s throat or strangling Beverly or any of the other horrors his subconscious plucks out like a Rolodex of murder.

Will shrugs. “I cope.”

He could be ten years ago, if he didn’t feel so old and worn and hollowed out under his ribs to make space for Hannibal Lecter. Idly, taking another sip of hot, burnt coffee, he wonders if he was born with that space there, or if it was made. God or Hannibal? Is there a difference?

“So,” says Mikey. “You uprooted your life for her?”

“Wasn’t much of a life,” Will says. 

Mikey considers him.

“No one could say you were dealt an easy hand, Graham.”

Will takes a sip of coffee, laughing softly. 

“No. They couldn’t. But I’m lucky. I know that,” Will says. He flicks ash from his cigarette and takes another drag. And he is lucky. He’s alive. He isn’t caged. He isn’t a vegetable in a hospital bed. _(Acts of God or acts of Hannibal Lecter?)_ “By the way, how did your daddy not throw a fit over this house of yours? A Victorian?”

Mikey laughs. “Oh, he gave me hell. The plaster work, the floors, the damn claw-foot tub.”

“Did he help you or did he just crack open a beer and put his feet up and tell you when you were doing it wrong?” Will asks. The house is a far cry from Will’s typical dwellings of basement one-bedrooms that had camp stoves, cockroaches, and mold. The painstakingly restored shotgun in quaint Covington, with its little green lawn with day lilies out front, might as well be a palace.

“The second,” Mikey says, rueful. “And it was a Crown Royal.”

“A fine choice,” Will says, tipping his mug a mock-toast. It had been Beau Graham’s poison too.

“That girl’s name ain’t Rebecca,” Mikey says eventually, voice low. “And she ain’t yours, Graham. You aren’t sloppy like that.”

_(You’d like to laugh. Doesn’t actually take much to convince you to go bare, apparently. Case in point: Margot Verger.)_

Will searches Mikey’s dark eyes, stiff with unease. “Who do you think she is, then?”

“Abigail Hobbs,” he says. When Will opens his mouth, Mikey grips Will around the bicep, shaking his head. “I’m not telling no one. I ain’t a snitch, I just don’t want you to lie to me after everything we went through.”

“Thanks,” Will says haltingly, still simmering with disquiet. 

“You and I don’t do trust, so let’s call it even?” Mikey says. 

Will can do mutual blackmail. At least now they really are even. When Will nods tightly, Mikey relaxes. He takes a long sip of coffee. 

“I kept up with your shit. The trial. Your incarceration,” he says. 

Will wants to say, _hope you kept reading,_ and then reminds himself, _don’t be an asshole, don’t be an asshole, don’t be an asshole_. Maybe if he says it enough times he won’t be. 

“I was acquitted,” Will says.

“I know. I’m just saying, I remember her face.”

Will sighs, flicking more ash onto the day-lilies blooming under the porch railing. “She’s mine in the way that matters.”

Mikey’s face softens. “I know what you mean.” There’s a long pause of quiet, during which he works his way through most of his cigarette. “Who are you running from?”

“My old boss wanted to hang her for what her dad did.”

“You helped? That’s why she—” He motions as if to cut off his ear. 

“Something like that,” Will shrugs. 

There’s another long silence.

“I knew you didn’t kill those people,” he says, taking out his own cigarette and lighting it. Hand-rolled, the way Mikey always liked them. At Will’s questioning eyebrow, Mikey continues. “You wouldn’t kill a kid. Or a sick girl. Or some poor bitch working at a coffee shop. The doctor, I thought, maybe, if he was enough of a dick. But not really.”

“Why?”

“You would have wanted to protect them,” Mikey shrugs, like it’s the simplest thing in the world. “If you’d killed a killer like Hobbs or someone who came after someone you cared about, I could have understood.” He pauses and looks at Will. “That fancy shrink believed you, but I didn’t like him. Man’s an asshole. You can see it from a picture.”

“God, is he ever,” Will laughs out loud. Because, you know, the fancy shrink framed him for all those murders. 

Mikey grins. “Those people really didn’t know you, did they? That Lounds lady or those FBI people.”

“Do you understand me?” Will asks, blinking in surprise. 

His skin itches, like it’s too small and poorly-tailored. Every skin feels like this, even this more down-to-earth Good Southern Boy skin he wore for years on the force. He understands now, in many ways thanks to Hannibal, why he’s always been as discordant and repulsive as an out of tune piano. 

_(Daddy would say, ‘you’ll cut off your tongue tryin’ to bite down that anger. Better t’ get it out. Maybe then people won’t be so damn rude t’ ya, son.’ You want to tell your Daddy that shooting a man to death, and everything you did after, didn’t do a damn thing about that.)_

_(“You’re more in control now than you’ve ever been.”)_

“No, and I won’t pretend to understand you,” Mikey says. Will is simultaneously disappointed and relieved. _You don’t want to understand me_. “But I _know_ you. Just because you move up north, switch your truck out for German-made, and get a fancy degree doesn’t mean you lose this place. You don’t lose who you were before. You can grow and change, but you still carry things with you.” 

Will bristles. “What makes you so sure?”

“Because you still put tabasco on your _sopa de caracol._ You ain’t too high and mighty to go down to Maria’s laundromat. And you drink my fuck-awful coffee without complaining.”

“It tastes like grease cleaner, Mikey,” Will laughs, and takes a long sip before it gets too cold to tolerate. “Is that really enough to say what kind of man I am?”

Mikey shrugs. “It never mattered to me what goes on in that head of yours. It matters what you do.”

Will stares down at his coffee, lips pressed together tight. He doesn’t agree at all. A stain is a stain. Desire matters as much as action, and now he’s got action under his belt.

“You carry shame everywhere you go,” Mikey sighs. “You wouldn’t be you without it.”

He leaves Will alone on the porch. _You carry shame everywhere you go._ Wanting anything is poison. Wanting poison is madness. 

( _You were compelled to do it, you tell yourself. A voice that sounds like Hannibal says, no one compelled you to like it. The violence. Not just the result of the violence.)_

He goes back inside when he can’t justify smoking the filter of his cigarette, quietly fills up a glass of tap water, and fishes out his little orange bottles of immunosuppressants and migraine medicine. He really ought to take them again, but they make him sick to his stomach and sleep like the dead, respectively. After he drinks his water down, he puts them back in his duffel bag without taking them. Maybe when they’re settled again. Maybe never. He likes that it’s his choice.

Abigail’s still deep asleep. Sinking back onto his bedroll on the floor, his fingers seek the soft ruff of Winston’s neck. He remembers the feel of all his dogs’ fur. If he thinks about the rest of his family, left behind in Hannibal’s care, he might lose it for real.

* * *

Logistically, grabbing nothing but the essentials and fishing gear and leaving Virginia without a word is a nightmare. He doesn’t have a job. He needs a new place to live, has an old place to pay a mortgage on, a dog and a twenty year old sort-of fugitive to take care of. He needs an address before he can find work anywhere. He doesn’t have any furniture. Mikey lets them stay another two days, leaving them alone while he goes off to work. Abigail mostly sulks on the sofa reading her werewolf book with Winston sprawled out belly-up like a cockroach at her side, begging for belly rubs. Will takes her to downtown Covington to get himself a laptop and some more books for Abigail early that day.

After calling around rental places almost as far as Baton Rouge, only a single place has a boat slip, isn’t on top of someone else’s house, is close enough to New Orleans for Abigail to not go stir-crazy, and won’t bankrupt him. It’s absolutely hideous, as Abigail points out. _(“The floors are plywood and cracked vinyl, Will. There’s fake wood paneling on every wall.”)_ But, it has two bedrooms, a dishwasher and laundry, sits right on a pilot channel that leads into Lake Pontchartrain, has a workshop, and has an enormous wraparound porch. It’s perfect. Downright luxurious as far as he’s concerned. The landlord, some recent retiree named Chuck Legaux who’s been living there since ‘83 seems to be torn about letting someone else live there. He debated about putting it up for sale as-is, but he built a lot by hand and hates to let it go. He has to let some of it go, since he’s moving out of the flood water zone.

(“ _Too arthritic t’ be going up and down all those stairs, and when I don’t hafta ‘cause of the floodwater, it’s no good either. Kids and grandkids want me somewhere safer,” he tells you in his lilting, uniquely New Orleans accent that sounds so much like Daddy used to. You wonder if this is where Beau would be if Momma had been saner, and if he hadn’t gotten those masses in his lungs, and if you were a bit more screwed on straight in the head.)_

Chuck doesn’t mind when Will offers to fix up a thing or two, after Will tells him he’s as comfortable with a table saw as he is with welding equipment. They complain about the newer bayou boats and shoot the shit about catching trout, Chuck easing with every new piece of evidence that Will’s a blue-collar worker looking to settle in the area and not some yuppie looking for a lakeside lifestyle. He doesn’t mind dogs either.

They’ll drive out to see it tomorrow and sign papers. They can move in in a week, if Chuck’s grandkids can put their backs into packing boxes. Packing up his own house and getting things down here is another logistical nightmare. Does he want the furniture, when most of it came with the house? Does he want his books or his records? Pots? Pans? Bedding? Is Hannibal going to follow a storage container to Louisiana?

And with the house sitting empty, should he sell it? Rent it? It had once been his boat on rolling waves, far from unwelcome shores; a quiet foreclosed haven of a farmhouse he’d found five years ago. A retiree with a recently deceased husband who couldn’t keep paying the bills after the death-knell of a predatory refinance and the subsequent housing market collapse. He’d bought it with the hefty check the police union cut him after he got stabbed.

Not so safe anymore.

He closes his eyes against the flash of Abigail’s ear in the sink. Of the slides and slides of fishing flies that he never touched on display in a courtroom. Of a tube being shoved down his esophagus. The hull of his ship breached. 

And if that’s not excruciating enough, there’s finding a vet, a dentist, a general practitioner, an eye doctor. He’s pulling his hair at the roots when Abigail steps in with a sharp, “Chill, we’ll figure it out, ok? Just put your stuff in storage and get it shipped down here. We can grab what we need and sell the rest, if you like.”

At Mikey’s kitchen counter, he sighs and rubs his hand over his mouth. At least one of them has their head screwed on straight. 

“Thanks,” he mumbles through his fingers. 

“Do you want a distraction or to power through it?” she asks. 

“Distraction,” Will says. 

“I want to go shopping,” she says, leaning with her back to the counter next to him, arms crossed. A clip keeps her hair in place over her mangled left ear. 

“Again? We just went downtown this morning.”

“Clothes and shoes,” she says. “I saw a big thrift store on our way in yesterday.”

“The Goodwill?” Will asks. 

It is, in fact, the Goodwill. It has a particular smell that takes him back to picking out musty clothes and second-hand shoes with his daddy in places like this when they had a couple bucks, and church charity drives when they had none. Now Abigail is here with him, Everything’s so damn circular. Present blurring over his past, bleeding out of the fracture in Jack Crawford’s office that started with eight missing girls.

“My mom had this _thing_ about secondhand stuff, like if I wore it people would think we were poor or something and she didn’t want any reminder of that. But there was this girl at school that always shopped at thrift stores,” says Abigail, browsing a rack of men’s shirts. “She had the coolest clothes. She always wore these black combat boots and big sweaters.”

“Do you miss it? Being around people your own age?” Will asks, trailing along through the clothing racks. 

A woman around his age in a waitress’ black uniform and orthotic shoes brushes past them; there’s an air of run-down exhaustion about her. Their eyes meet for a split-second and then turn back to their own worlds. She’s got school-age kids to buy clothes for that she’s working overtime to afford and doesn’t have much to spare for herself, and he’s here because Abigail decided she wants oversize plaids and vintage jeans.

“Sometimes. Sometimes pretending to be normal is easier. Sometimes it isn’t,” Abigail says, shrugging.

She throws a couple more shirts in her basket and then moves on, grabbing a few shorts and dresses and such while Will busies himself in another aisle. He ends up picking up a few pairs of shorts and short-sleeved shirts for the hotter weather, and some work pants that should hold up on the docks.

He finds her again looking at a wall of scarves and handbags, inspecting a collection of vintage silk scarves.

“These look sort of like the ones Hannibal bought me. They were a special kind of mulberry silk from Veneto, Italy where they’re reviving traditional silk making,” she says, looking a little lost in memory. Regretful. “He got them from some special place in Milan that designs all his pocket squares. They were so soft. I don’t even know how much they cost.”

She puts a couple of bright blue and burgundy ones in her basket, looking a little forlorn. Will bristles, churning with guilt over his tight hold on his dwindling bank account. He turns away from her in a restless semi-circle. His eyes seek out the waitress that passed them before, but he can’t find her anymore amongst the racks.

“You should have stuck with the titled Count and not the unemployed guy who grew up on donation clothes and food stamps if you wanted something like that and not some secondhand shit,” he says, bitter. 

Abigail flinches away. “Sor—”

“Don’t apologize,” Will interrupts, shaking his head. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

_(“Harboring a half-buried grudge against the rich?” he asks._

_“Aren’t we all,” you say.)_

It’s all very subdued until Abigail stumbles across someone’s collection of novelty fishing-themed clothing and picks up a baseball cap that says, _women want me, fish fear me_ , with the sort of mischievous glee that spells disaster. 

Will’s mouth twitches with suppressed laughter. “No way. Absolutely not.”

“Yes way,” she says, putting the baseball cap in their shopping basket. “If you won’t wear it I will.”

After she finds herself a pair of ancient Doc Martens, which only makes her even happier, they spend some time by a collection of old CDs, cassettes and records and Abigail proudly fishes out a Pasty Cline CD. 

“For the car,” she says. “Some variety. There’s only so much Smiths I can handle.”

In the end, Will finds a few more CD of mostly classic blues and they check out. The drive back to Mikey’s has a subdued, unspoken weight.

“Sorry,” she says eventually, when they’re stopped at a stoplight. “I don’t care if you can buy me expensive stuff. It’s not like I really had much a of a choice in what Hannibal got me. I never got anything like that growing up. I mean, we weren’t rich. Dad was a pipe-threader. Mom was a secretary. But we weren’t…”

“Poor,” Will says.

“Yeah,” she says, still staring out the passenger window instead of at him. “Sorry if you didn’t want to go back to a place like that.”

“It’s fine. Really,” he says, because it is. He’s always been partial to broken and cast-off things. “I’m not a millionaire but we aren’t going to starve while I’m looking for work.”

“Did you... did you ever go hungry?” she asks, frowning.

_(The answer is yes, despite all your Daddy’s long hours and constant moving to look for better work and your watermelon thievery and free church pantries, but she’s touched a tender spot and you’d like to quietly lick your wounds instead of digging them open.)_

* * *

The house up for rent sits on high stilts at the end of a logging access road, backing up to the wide marshes and channels sprawling along the northern edge of Lake Pontchartrain. Chuck greets them both. He’s in his late sixties, tall and lean and tanned as old shoe leather. He carries a big Bowie knife strapped to his belt that looks sharp enough to trim his bushy silver beard and squints at them behind rectangular, wire-rimmed glasses. He’s a little surprised at the sight of Abigail, introduced as Will’s daughter Rebecca, and his eyes linger on Will’s left hand. Will’s bare left hand. 

Abigail goes off to see the porch and the inside of the house while Will checks out the old dock and workshop. The water meter, air conditioning unit, and high piles upon which the house is set all check out. 

“You keeping the boat?” Will asks as he inspects the green, shallow, snub-nosed thing tied up to the dock. 

“You want it?” 

“Sure,” Will shrugs. “I was going to get one anyway.”

Chuck agrees. 

The workshop is a good space, with tables and pegboard storage.

“What happened t’ her momma?” Chuck asks while Will pokes around. 

“Dead.”

“Not married?”

“Not right now,” Will says, sighing as he picks up the train of conversation. His father’s wedding ring sits in the inside pocket of his old waxed canvas jacket, hung up in the old mudroom of his farmhouse in Wolf Trap. Beau wore it until he died, and not just to avoid nosy Southerners like Chuck. Will tried it on once and it slid right off. “Don’t like to talk about it. Neither does Rebecca.”

Chuck just shrugs. “A man’s business is his business.”

Abigail waits for them on the porch. Chuck takes some time to climb the steps and Will feels his aches as if they’re his own. Will’s going to end up that way in thirty-odd years if he’s lucky; his left shoulder is twice-ruined, his feet are quick to ache from long days of police duty, the joints of his fingers hurt more often than they dont, especially after working on boat motors. Time isn’t kind to anyone, lest of all Will Graham. 

The house smells distinctively musty, but it’s clean, all the appliances work, and all the electrical looks good. Chuck says the wood-burning stove in the corner of the kitchen is in good working order and heats the place up well in the winter. The living room decor lies along the lines of a mounted shotgun, a lumpy brown recliner sofa, and taxidermy. 

The worst offender is the taxidermy deer's head above the toilet in the single bathroom. 

“Oh, cool,” Abigail says. Will tries and clearly fails to not make a face. “You don’t think it’s cool?”

“I, uh…I think maybe I’d like to move it…somewhere else,” he says. The prospect of staring into the glass eyes of a dear deer every time he takes a piss is distinctly unappealing. 

“Why?” she frowns. He stands in front of the toilet and gives her a pointed look. Her lips twitch with barely restrained laughter. She grins. “Oh, now we have to keep it.”

Will shakes his head, covering his mouth to keep from laughing. Chuck’s waiting for them out on the porch when they’re done poking around the two bedrooms. After a few shared words, Will writes him a check, promising the next one in the mail, and they shake on it. It’s the least painful part of all this. More worrying is the whole furniture dilemma and packing up and renting out the Wolf Trap house, but he tries to set that aside for tomorrow. 

They walk Winston through downtown Covington together, Abigail in an oversize plaid shirt flung over a formless black dress, a beret perched on her head. With a pair of enormous plastic glasses, she looks like an art student or like she walked off the set of Twin Peaks instead of Abigail Hobbs, dead Midwestern tragedy. Something like satisfaction pings around the back of his skull and it takes him two blocks to figure out that it’s coming from her. 

“You’re pleased,” he says. 

“No one recognizes me,” she says, low enough that no one passing by can hear her. “I’m alive. I’m seeing something new. I’m not cooped up and I’m wearing whatever the hell I want. It’s like fuckin’ Christmas.”

Sometimes, he looks at her and he can’t quite believe she’s really alive. 

For their last dinner that night with Mikey, Will and Abigail step up with shrimp and grits while Mikey works late. Abigail’s fingers drum on the counter by the bag of grits she measures out. She has milk heating up on the stove behind him while he deveins shrimp at the kitchen island.

“There were others...that you bit. You’re a killer now,” she says, even and measured like she’s been turning the words over her head. 

Will looks up over his shoulder. She’s leaning against the counter with her arms crossed, chin jutted like she’s daring him to lie to her. He nods. Abigail’s shoulders relax. A ghost of a smile crosses her face.

“Freddie Lounds thought you and Hannibal killed that guy that tore all those people apart,” she says. Will gives her a look and she arches her brow in reply. “What about Freddie? You guys do that?”

Will goes still.

“I’m guilty of that too,” he says after a few tense heartbeats. 

A line creases her brow, but she whisks grits into boiling milk under his instruction and asks no more questions.

They leave early the next morning. It’s Mikey’s day to drive his girls to school, and they’ll be home for the rest of the week. Rosa has a science fair exhibit on a heart-rate monitor she built herself, while Ana has a book report on _Huckleberry Finn_.

“Look...if a pretty redhead with psycho eyes comes poking her nose around, do yourself a favor and don’t talk to her,” Will tells Mikey on his way out the door. 

Abigail is already in the car with Winston.

“Is it that lady that runs the gossip rag?” Mikey asks.

“Yeah,” Will says. “Seriously. She doesn’t have any shame. She’ll sell out your entire family for ad clicks.”

“Any other skeletons in your closet I should watch out for?” Mikey asks. 

“Closet’s nothing but skeletons, you know that,” Will jokes. Will wants to say _if you see Lucifer himself in a cashmere suit and polished Ferragamo’s, call me._ He doesn’t. “Just…keep…Abigail as quiet as you can, yeah? She doesn’t need that bullshit. Please.”

The motel they stay at for the next few days has limited but free wifi and backs up to a park, to where Will and Abigail both escape often with Winston. Sometimes together, with an easy silence between them, or alone. He tries not to fuss, but always gives her the handgun to tuck into her pants, concealed carry permits be damned. It’s Louisiana. The Walmart probably sells high-capacity magazines, for fuck’s sake. 

After more phone calls than he cares to say, he has a company scheduled to pack up the stuff in his house into storage and arranged to be shipped down South in a few more days. The realtor he hires acts like he’s just thrilled Will wants to put up his house for rent. Based on the fliers Will gets in the mail from real estate agents begging him to sell the place and offering top-dollar or full cash for what Will knows is just going to end up in a tear-down, lot subdivision, and five or six McMansions crammed on his property, the thrill isn’t genuine. Not that Will cares. He puts the price at exactly what he pays on the mortgage and not a cent more out of pure spite. He doesn’t give anyone a forwarding address.

Meanwhile, Abigail reads, scrolls job openings, and occasionally berates him into getting better quotes on all the moving nonsense because he’s the type to apologize to the waitress that pours soup in his lap and then tip her the equivalent of the check. Abigail’s not pricked by working-poor solidarity or other people’s feelings like he is.

Mikey’s contact Lorenzo delivers on Abigail’s documents, procuring a Louisiana driver’s license and passport for a Rebecca Louise Carter. 

Will ends up helping Chuck pack up the house, and in return, Chuck lends his old pickup for a day for Will and Abigail to grab things from the storage container Will had shipped to Baton Rouge. Abigail drives the Volvo in automatic mode, packed with kitchenware and bedding and towels while he tails her with the piano strapped into the truck bed. He worries about her getting pulled over or crashing his meticulously-maintained car so much he sweats through his shirt. It’s such a stupidly paternal thing to feel and he hates himself for it.

* * *

Will hasn’t stepped into a Piggly Wiggly in at least ten years. He’s here now, twenty minutes away from the rental place they finally moved into that morning after getting the beds and mattresses out of storage, watching with a slow, gnawing sense of horror as Abigail puts a pack of Verger-brand bacon in their shopping cart along with the pasta, rice, chicken, shrimp, and various other necessities. 

“Let’s get the other stuff,” he says, and swaps it out for another brand.

“Didn’t realize you were picky,” Abigail says, a little miffed. 

“It’s...personal,” he says vaguely. Abigail frowns at him and wanders off to get cereal while Will looks for bread.

Back in the car, the inevitable interrogation arrives. 

“The Vergers have an estate in Maryland,” she says. “Looks like the heir had some horrible accident there recently with his pigs and his sister is running the business now.”

“I heard something like that,” Will replies, pulling out of the parking lot. It’s late morning and the sun sends a harsh, warm glare over everything. 

“Margot Verger not so far from your age,” she says, shaking her hair off her face. “Pretty. She was also all over the tabloids a couple years back. She’s gay.”

“I didn’t know you read tabloids.”

“I didn’t read tabloids until you took bacon out of our shopping cart grumbling about how ‘it’s personal,’” she says. “Funny, they have a farm and a meatpacking plant not so far from here. About an hour or so north. Up in Mississippi.”

“They have meatpacking plants all over the country,” Will says. “And they have a nasty habit of testing positive for human DNA when someone causes a fuss about working conditions.”

Abigail hums, considering. “So do you just have issues with unwitting cannibalism, or?”

Will glances over at her after he makes a left turn, then huffs. 

“Mason Verger is a sadist and a vulgar, pitiful excuse for a human being,” Will says finally. 

Abigail is quiet for a few blocks. Not a contemplative quiet, but a whirring sort of quiet, where he can hear the gears in her head clicking steadily to the inevitable conclusion.

“Margot didn’t just lose the baby. Your baby with her. Her brother did something, didn’t he?” she says finally.

“She tried to run, but Mason’s men got to her. He gave her a hysterectomy.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah,” Will grinds out, his fingers flexing around the steering wheel.

“So he found out she was pregnant?” Abigail asks.

Will tries to relax his grip. “I can’t be sure he really _found out,_ just was...made aware she might try to have a kid and made sure she never could.”

“So she wasn’t just trying to have an heir to get the family money. She was trying so she could kill him and get away with it,” Abigail says. She turns to Will. “So was it you or Hannibal who mangled his face and snapped his neck?”

_(Clever girl.)_

“What brought you to that conclusion?”

“She was Hannibal’s patient. If Mason was abusing Margot, Hannibal would try and help her get her control back. He wouldn’t exactly like her being kidnapped and sterilized. And if that baby was yours too...well. Wait, you would have gone to him, wouldn’t you? Did you threaten him? No, you couldn’t have, you would have just been found in the pig pen. You sent Mason after _Hannibal._ ”

Will glances at her out of the corner of his eye. “You think you know me that well?”

“I remember the cut on Hannibal’s temple. He said some men came to his office and attacked him. He also said you provided a means of escape,” she says. Will doesn’t deny it. He doesn’t confirm it either, letting the silence hang. “He said you got a concussion for your efforts.”

He can still feel the sharp, blooming pain and the sicking crack against his skull, the stench of blood and pig shit, the gutting emptiness to which he woke and the relief of finding a bleeding, mangled body to not be Hannibal after all. 

_(He’s yours. He’s yours to kill, to hurt, to cage. He’s your monster, and death to anyone who lays a hand on him.)_

“Getting pistol-whipped unconscious will do that,” Will muses.

Abigail smiles like the cat that got the cream.

“You don’t have to be so vague, you know,” she says. “I’m dead, who am I going to go to? The police?”

Will snorts. “I didn’t do anything to him. He mangled his own face.”

“What, he like, cut it off?” Abigail says, rolling her eyes, then, catching Will’s pinched mouth, sobers. “Oh god he cut it off.” 

Will nods, teeth worrying his bottom lip as they pull onto the long, tree-lined road with a deep ditch on one side that leads to their new house. 

“He, uh, fed it to my dogs.”

Abigail blinks. “Damn, even your dogs eat people.”

He almost wants to tell her how the dogs ate most of Randall Tier, but that’s probably not the best line of conversation, especially if he doesn’t want to give her grounds for an arrest warrant on a silver platter. He thinks about horror. Of being birthed from a stag. Of the ghostly whispers following him reminding him that there’s no saving himself anymore. That no one was ever going to save him.

_To the truth, then. And all its consequences._

* * *

Winston’s happy to see them when they get home. Will and Abigail put groceries away together with some fumbling and bumping into each other. Mostly from his end. She’s lived with her parents and with Hannibal for a little while, but he’s been alone for so long.

When they’re done, Abigail takes to the piano and practices her scales and some simpler lines of Bach. He sits in the old mustard lounge chair with his eyes closed and his hands laced over his stomach. He’ll need to put clothes back into his dresser and organize the fishing gear in the workshop before dinner, but for now, he can be still and listen to Abigail play. He feels a strange sense of satisfaction, the kind that larger-than-life Beau Graham got after a good summer season. One year they’d rented a house in Sandusky with an actual bedroom for Will. He remembers the oranges Daddy bought at the market and how they’d raced to see who could peel them fastest. 

_This is familiar to you,_ Abigail said in Knoxville _. Washed up old man dragging around his overly perceptive kid? Yeah, that’s familiar._ The rogue, unwelcome thought of _trying to outrun the memory of his wife_ creeps up on him for a split-second before he can shove it back, well-barricaded. 

_(Maybe you don’t need a picket fence or a mother to be family. Maybe all you need is a roof and a promise to look out for each other. Maybe all you need is to look at someone and forgive the things you see reflected in them, instead of trying to save them. You can’t save yourself. You don’t think you can save Abigail. You think you have to take her or leave her as she is — distant and cutting and incisive as she is. Murderer as she is.)_

Once he’s done in the workshop, reels and lines and poles all hung up and tidied while Winston trails at his heels, Will starts on dinner. He puts rice on and butterflies the whole chicken, splitting it up into half to boil plain for Winston and half roasted for him and Abigail. He’s curious about where Abigail’s gone off to until he hears a floorboard creak behind him and the click of a safety latch.

He wants to say, _really, when I’m trying to cook?_ What he does is set the spoon down, turn off the rice and boiling chicken, and turn around slowly, palms raised. The peace was never going to last forever.

Abigail’s cornflower eyes are red-rimmed, with bright spots on her cheeks like she’s holding back crying or screaming. _I could use a good scream,_ he remembers telling Alana when she’d looked a lot like this, _I can feel one perched just under my chin._ That gun’s been pointed at someone in two significant kitchens already, it must mean something that it’s being pointed here too. Unlike his, her hands around the grip of his handgun are sure and steady. Her aim is true. Dead center of his heart. 

There won’t be ten bullets, or a girl gasping for air as she suffocates on her own blood. There won’t be blood in his mouth. Blood on his glasses. Blood soaking all the way up to his elbows as he tries to keep a girl’s throat closed.

( _You knew all along. You knew the second he put the knife to her neck to protect her from the FBI that she was guilty. And you needed to save her so badly, needed her to be innocent so badly because you pulled a trigger ten times and you loved it. And you knew what that made you.)_

“Winston will need his heartworm meds in about a month, if you decide to keep him,” he says. He doesn’t think he can save himself. “Please take care of him.”

Abigail blinks quickly before regaining her veil of composure. 

“How would you murder me?” she asks, cold and challenging. 

( _You already did. You murdered her in the kitchen by her father’s knife and you murdered her again in Minnesota. You murdered her a third time when you lied about killing Freddie Lounds and Hannibal Lecter believed you. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.)_

“What, you want a trifecta of murder attempts from paternal figures in your life?” he snorts. “I’m not going to kill you, Abigail.”

_Manipulative,_ Alana had said. _Somewhat under-emotional._ She’s not under-emotional, she’s under-emotive. Like Hannibal, she’s a cool, smooth river with harsh currents under the surface. 

“Don’t tell me after all your nightmares and stepping into the heads of killers that you’ve never imagined it,” she says.

He hates how she isn’t wrong.

“I said I’d look after you,” he says.

“What, like my dad promised he’d look after me? Like Hannibal promised to protect me?” she sneers. “How can you promise that when you were on Jack’s side?”

Will’s brows crease. “I’m not your dad. But you can’t...you can’t make me not feel responsible for you.”

“I don’t want to be your fucking burden!” she snaps.

“You—” He starts, rolling his tongue over his teeth until it hurts. “You wanted this.”

“And you didn’t,” she says, her whole lower jaw trembling. “You didn’t — you don’t want this. You didn’t want us. You don’t want _me.”_

He blinks. 

“What?” he hisses. 

“He made a place for us. We were supposed to leave together. But you _lied_ to him. And then you just—” She bares her teeth, her eyes brimming over— “you just _kept lying_.” 

Will shakes his head. “I—”

“TattleCrime posted something new today,” she says through clenched teeth. “Funny. The headline was ‘ _Sike, not dead! Back from vacation!’_ by Freddie Lounds.”

Oh. That’s what all this is about. He wants to say something like _I wish I killed Freddie_ or _I wanted to see Hannibal’s smug face behind bars_ or _I wanted him to understand what he did to me_ or _I promised him a reckoning but all I did was borrow time to keep enjoying the game with no consequences._

“Well, that’s a fuckin’ spectacularly stupid clickbait title,” he says, easing to the side so he can lean his back against the counter without burning himself on the still-hot stove. “But she’s always outdone herself in vulgarity.”

“She was _dead._ You _killed her._ You said you were guilty of her, but you lied. You...was that your plan with Jack? To fake her death? Did you trick Hannibal that way?”

He sighs. 

“Yeah,” he says, his eyes fluttering closed. 

“Did you lie to me? When you said you were a killer? Did you lie to Hannibal about Randall Tier?”

“No. There was just one lie,” he says, running his hand over his face, over his stinging eyes.

“What was the lie?” Abigail says. 

“That…that I killed Freddie Lounds,” he admits. He looks up at her. “Guess we were both lying about killing someone.”

She falters, then picks up her resolve again. “Why did you say you were guilty?”

He’s guilty of so many things he doesn’t know where the hell to begin. All the traded murder attempts, all the dinners, all the veiled conversations in two facing leather chairs or side-by-side in front of a fire, sipping Scotch or brandy, the traded barbs, the bandaged knuckles, the crack of bones as they took Randall Tier apart, the depraved euphoria of bones and blood and armagnac bursting in his mouth as they ate ortolans, the explicit trust of handing Will a honed knife to slice the ginger, the warmth of a hand on his face, and even the lamb. All of that, and only one lie.

He’s guilty of not killing her. Guilty of imagining the thrill of killing her. Guilty, most of all, for the single lie of _I was euphoric when I killed Freddie Lounds._ He doesn’t even know what part is the ugliest: that it was the only lie in his elaborate game with Hannibal, or that he lied at all.

“Because in my head, I killed her. I killed her over and over and over and over again.”

“Why...why didn’t you?”

He looks her square in the eyes. “Because I couldn’t get away with it.”

“You wanted to kill her. But you didn’t.”

He nods, lips pressed together tight. Abigail lets out a sharp exhale. She flicks the safety back on and returns the gun to top of the piano. Will, hesitant, takes the few steps to the living room. There’s a stormy determination on Abigail’s face as she turns to him, eyes sliding over him first, then her body following. 

She lunges.

Her bony fist clips him over the temple as he dodges a black eye, pivoting on his toes. He gasps. Pain blooms in his head, and he barely has time to think, _haven’t I had enough brain damage to last me a lifetime,_ before she knees him in the stomach. There’s a vicious, cold-blooded euphoria in her wild eyes as she shoves him to the floor. 

He narrowly avoids knocking his head on the ground. Winded, he gasps for air with shallow breaths, clutching his tender stomach. Haughty and shaking, Abigail stands over him. Her hair falls wildly over her forehead. All around him, the room spins. He wonders how much of this is from his baseline partially cooked brain and how much is the lingering concussion from Carlo. He wonders if Hannibal would care if he was dead. He wonders if Hannibal is the only one who would care. 

“Go ahead,” he says, dragging himself up on one elbow, his hand cradling his tender stomach. “Whatever you’re gonna do, do it quickly.”

“Fight back,” she hisses. 

He shakes his head. They both know he had it coming. He wets his chapped bottom lip and finds it cracked, blood blooming over his tongue. “Nothing I can say or do can bring your parents back. Bring your old life back.”

“This wasn’t supposed to be my life,” she says. Her fists clench and unclench at her sides. 

Will staggers into a sitting position until he can put his head between his knees. He rubs his bare arms where they’re looped around his legs. _I prayed I would see Abigail again,_ he’d said. 

_(Well, your prayer did not go entirely unanswered, he tells you. You saw a part of her, he says and you’re torn between smashing his head open with the black and gold clock he keeps on his desk and collapsing under the weight of that series of transgressions. You were never more on Jack’s side than you were that night.)_

Grimacing, he says, “It wasn’t supposed to be mine either.”

Her switchblade opens with a _fwip,_ glinting, and he curls his fingers tighter around his stomach. He drags his eyes up to meet hers. To _look._ It’s like stepping into a sea of blood, roiling and thrashing and wounded. 

_Killing...even if you have to...it feels that bad?_

_I was the lure._

_It felt good._

She puts the blade under his chin. It’s sharp and it bites. 

_I think you want to discourage me from disappearing with you because you want to go back to him._

_You don’t want me._

_I don’t want to be your burden._

He forces himself to look at her even though her crashing sea of feelings run through him like a rusty, dented knife to the shoulder socket. 

“But I wouldn’t...” He clears his throat. “I wouldn’t trade it,” he admits. 

_(Because you were asleep until Hannibal found you. Because you thought, for a fleeting moment before you saw betrayal, that someone could love you even after they knew who you were.)_

Her maelstrom stutters. “Why?”

“Because you’re alive. We’re both alive,” he says with a slightly hysterical laugh. “You’re not a burden, Abigail.”

“Did you…did you ever want to be a family like he promised?” she asks, sounding young and small.

Will nods.

“But you and I both know it wasn’t going to end the way he wanted. It wasn’t sustainable. You know it wasn’t sustainable,” he says. The pressure of the blade lightens. She chews on her cheek while her unnaturally blue eyes dart all over his face. “You weren’t going to let me be a father to you like Hannibal wanted. You weren’t going to be Mischa. I knew that. Hannibal didn’t.”

Achilles and Patroclus never conquered Troy together; Achilles only loved Patroclus after he was already dead. Hannibal wrote them all a softer ending where cups come back together or they never break. But fairy tales end. The real world exists outside, and they have to live in it even if none of them really belong in it.

“His sister,” Abigail confirms.

“Yes.” There’s a pause where her thoughts whir in her skull, connections coming together and information slotting into place. He has no doubt she’ll needle him about it another time. When her expression settles, Will takes in a shaky breath. “I’m — I’m, uh, terrified of terrifying you. Of…going too far and you not wanting me around because I’m one of those people who’s always going to be stained to you.”

Her lower lip trembles. 

“I was so…I was so _envious_ of you,” she spits out. “I loved my dad but I wanted…I wish I could have felt what you felt…wish I could have killed him, sometimes. You got to kill him and he didn’t even hurt you. He didn’t even betray you.”

_(‘He didn’t even hurt you. He didn’t even betray you.’ No. Someone else did, and you hate how you don’t hate him for it.)_

“He made both of us killers,” Will says. 

Her next breath drags, shaky and sudden. She exhales slowly and gives a small nod. Pocketing the switchblade, she holds out her hand and helps Will up. Two or three of Abigail swim in front of his eyes — he really ought to eat and get some proper sleep — before resolving into one Abigail folding herself into his arms. Will holds her close, cheek pressed to the top of her head.

“I was scared of the wrong person. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I thought you were crazy,” she says, her voice hitching. 

“It’s not your fault,” he whispers back, choking around the words. “Not your fault.”

“I keep thinking what would have happened if I never agreed to talk to Freddie. If I never tried so hard to prove my innocence. If I’d just said he forced me to help or he’d kill me to Jack...if I never dragged you into all of it.”

_I feel like I dragged you into my world._

_I got here on my own, but I appreciate the company._

“We were all in the mud with you already, Abigail,” he says, combing absently through her hair. “I told ya, I’m right beside you. I know you. I know what you’ve done. I know what you’ve been through.”

_I’m alone in that darkness._

_You’re not alone, I’m standing right beside you._

“Because you can pretend to be anyone?”

“I…I don’t have to pretend. He...he took something from me too,” Will says.

She pulls back to look at him. 

“Knowing that he was going to give it back?” she chuckles darkly. “Until he decided he wouldn’t?”

“Like Lucy and the football,” Will sighs. He licks blood from the crack in his lip and Abigail’s eyes flicker to it. He catches a flash of guilt on her face and he shakes his head. “Don’t apologize.”

She trembles. A tremor that turns into a cataclysm of hot tears and sobbing so hard she’s gasping for air, crashing back against him, soaking the front of his shirt and all he can do is hold on while she bleeds water, shaking like tree branches groaning against a gale. He can’t tell who is the knife and who is the open wound, he just knows when he presses his eyes shut, his cheeks are wet too. 

_(There aren’t words for this. You can get close by describing a church collapse, or the way your Daddy’s hand finally went still and peaceful for the first time, or the aching horror of seeing who did this to you and made sure no one believed you in the skin of the first person you ever trusted.)_

They eat chicken and rice at the dining table, while Winston eats his dinner on the floor. The rice is faintly on the soggy side from the heat being turned off a few minutes early and Abigail complains that the chicken rub is too spicy. His head hurts and his split lip keeps bleeding most of the dinner, but it’s all right. It’s okay. When they look at each other, he thinks they might be okay.

After dishes, night falling over the house, Will pours himself a glass of whiskey, coats his bare feet and ankles in bug spray, and steps out onto the porch. He settles on the top of the stairs in absence of there being anything else to sit on. He tilts the glass in slow motion, watching amber liquid slosh in the faint light from the house. Whiskey sits sharp on Will’s tongue.

The heavy scent of swamp and brackish water on warm and humid air fills his lungs. A unique bouquet of plough mud, rotting vegetation, with notes of bug spray and high-proof grain alcohol. All around, bullfrogs croak. The gators chitter. Crickets sing in the deep, black night. Will takes another sip, looking up at the Milky Way slashing the sky above. Above, past the thick cypress trees surrounding the house, stars glint bright. Orion’s belt. Wherever Hannibal is, perhaps some of their stars are the same.

Does he haunt Hannibal the way Will is haunted?

“Can I try some?” Abigail asks, sitting down on the porch stairs with a strong waft of bug spray.

“You aren’t twenty-one,” he says, and smiles at the withering look she shoots him. _Murder, remember?_

“My ID says I am,” she declares. He hands her the glass, grinning as she splutters after the first sip. “You _drink_ this?” 

He takes the glass and knocks it all back. “It’s an acquired taste. You need to have a streak of masochism.”

She rolls her eyes. “Men.”

He rubs his eyes, calluses pulling at the skin of his eyelids, palms scraping over new stubble. 

“I think you’re okay,” she blurts out. Will blinks. “I mean, you’re weird and kind of insane and often scary. But I think you’re okay.”

“Thanks,” Will deadpans.

They sit in an awkward silence in which Abigail bravely grimaces through another sip and they pass the glass back and forth like a joint, one of them tolerating and the other enjoying.

“You didn’t end up on Jack’s side, did you?” Abigail says. “Hannibal…he betrayed you, didn’t he? You trusted him.”

Will knocks back the last of the whiskey. He sighs. “I wanted...I needed him to know what it felt like for someone to be your friend and then turn everyone against you. To strip you down until you have nothing. No professional respect. No dignity. No sunlight. I wanted to put him in a cage. See how he liked it.”

“But you didn’t,” Abigail says. She shifts until her arms are looped around her drawn up legs and her chin rests on her knees. Her hair’s as inky black as the night.

“No. I didn’t.”

“Why?” she asks softly.

“Because — because he was my friend,” he admits, closing his eyes. “And I wanted…I wanted…”

“You wanted to go with us,” she says, the tension around her eyes and mouth relaxing. 

“I didn’t know about you. To me, he was asking me to go with him even thinking he’d killed you.” Will takes a steadying breath. His next works come out small. “I wanted to go with him. And part…part of me always will.”

“And yet…” she says, flashing him a small, sympathetic smile. She knocks her shoulder against his. 

“And yet,” Will replies, tilting his whiskey glass in emphasis.

“We’re like a ‘Hannibal’s family’ support group, aren’t we? Both of us sitting here wondering if it’s better to be loved for a little while or to go on without it,” she says finally.

“You hate support groups.”

“I hate support groups where I have to lie just to get through them. Where I see the faces of every girl my dad killed all in a circle, blaming me,” she shoots back.

Will shrugs as if to say, _fair._ Then, considering, says, “Any definition of love Hannibal has is light years from anyone else’s.”

“You think he doesn’t love?”

“Hannibal has an abundance of empathy, all of which is under his inscrutable control,” Will says. “A butcher can fully love something and slaughter it. Maybe he can love someone more than himself or his freedom. I don’t think that person is alive right now.”

He wonders if that died with Mischa.

“I don’t know about that,” Abigail says, her tone light. “If there’s anyone, it would be you.”

* * *

Will lies in the dark on his camp bed. He’s sleeping in a real bedroom, though it has a view of the drive so he can easily see someone driving up. He thought about washing the sheets that used to be on the bed, but they smell like his home in Wolf Trap, and strangely, faintly of something woodsy that reminds him of Hannibal’s cologne. For the first time in days Abigail, her quiet breathing, and her nightmares are out of reach in another room. He’s left with his own, and his handgun under his pillow.

After tossing and turning for an hour, against his better judgement, he turns his old phone back on and navigates to the glaring new voicemail from Hannibal. It’s dated from a week ago, when they were still at Mikey’s. Like the inevitable drag of a magnet, his fingers find the play button and press the phone to his ear. 

_“Hello, Will,”_ he says, the rich timbre of his voice distorted by the phone. “ _I believe Alana spoke to you regarding the care of your dogs. I offered to take on the mantle for the weekend and they were well cared for. You are, as I have heard, not returning to your home or your dogs.”_ There’s a brief inhale, which for Hannibal might as well be a tremble. _“I will continue to care for them. Alana expressed interest in caring for Harley and Jack. Unless you reply in protest, I will deliver them to her.”_

His voice is a field amputation. _A shot of whiskey and a stick to bite on for you, Mr. Graham, while you get sawed into. Bite hard. There’s going to be blood everywhere._

_“I spoke to Kade Prurnell today. I’m finding it difficult to reconcile the man of the last twelve weeks with this news,”_ he says. There’s a long, heavy pause. “ _Did you think you could change me, the way I changed you?_ ”

Will swallows hard around the lump in his throat. The corners of his eyes sting. _Lack of sleep,_ he thinks. He tries not to think about how he hasn’t escaped anything. How he’s a bleeding, mangled half of one continuous being. How he doesn’t know where Hannibal begins and he ends. He thinks about getting in the car, driving out to Lake Pontchartrain, and throwing the phone into it. Instead, he turns it off, and takes out the battery again, and puts it in the bottom of his sock drawer where it’s less likely to tempt him to call back.

(‘ _Did you think you could change me, the way I changed you?’)_

He can’t sleep for the spectre of Hannibal outside the front door, slipping in like smoke through the cracks and spreading darkness into the corners of the room. Spreading darkness over Will. Like a blanket. Like a shroud. He grips the outline of his handgun under his pillow, trying to swallow back the unspeakable feeling crawling out from the back of his throat like choking on a thicket of antlers. 

_(There’s a word for this but you can’t say it.)_

He’s a stupid thing laid out on an altar, a lamb walking out onto the killing floor, a grotesque creature begging, saying _I’m good, I can be good, I can be loved._

_(He tells you he doesn’t need a sacrifice. You say, I don’t trust that I’m not the sacrifice. You say, I think you already slaughtered me and I’m just left dragging my entrails on the floor. You say, I’m pulling my own goddamn broken teeth out of my own goddamn mouth for some sharp object to cut you with. You say, I’m smothering how much I need you to pick me up off the floor and stitch me back up with an oil slick of my own blood.)_

There’s a word for this but he can’t say it, and drifts off to sleep with his hand clenched around an unloaded gun. For whatever that’s worth. 

He dreams of separating salt from water. Soft, briny flakes melt on his tongue.

“I’d empty the ocean, Will,” Hannibal says. He looms over Will, soaked. Will gasps in lungfuls of his seawater scent tinged with smoke. Water drips from his face and hair onto Will’s. Cold. Hot. Burning his eyes. “I’d drain the water from my body. All to let you boil the salt from me.”

Drip. Drip. Drip. 

Boiling. 

Salt.

Metal.

On Hannibal’s tongue, Will tastes tears and blood. He sighs into the press of soft lips. Blood and breath. _I don’t need a sacrifice._

Will wakes, burning, in the gray half-light of dawn. This dream too is a nightmare. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter really just ballooned while I was writing it, so I hope you all enjoy it. Will had a lot of ground to cover before we head back into Abigail's POV. The taxidermy deer over the toilet is from a real-life zillow listing I found.
> 
> If anyone is wondering about ~update schedules, I'm not strictly adhering to anything but updates tend to happen every other weekend. 
> 
> Thank you all so far about your lovely and insightful comments!!! I really enjoy reading them.


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